The reinvention of enterprise software.Java market fragmentation . OSGi bundles . Microkernel-based architectures

ERIC NEWCOMER
CTO, Iona Technologies

Eric Newcomer leads IONA's participation in all standardization activities, and has been involved in Web services standardization activities from the beginning. As Chief Technology Officer he is responsible for directing and communicating IONA's technology roadmap, as well as its product strategy as it relates to standards adoption, architecture, and product design.

2. In the Java market fragmentation will increase rather than lessen. The recent split between JBI and SCA, and the disagreements over Java EE 6 and OSGi will escalate tensions as the pressure increases on BEA/Oracle, IBM, and Sun to take market share from each other in a diminishing market. Meanwhile, Microsoft has an opportunity to grow stronger behind the leadership of Ray Ozzie and is likely to surprise those who believe the battle for the enterprise is over and Java has already won.  

3.  Specifications and reference implementations for the enterprise edition of OSGi software will be completed, laying the foundation for the most significant change in the Java market since the emergence of the Spring Framework, although Sun is likely to continue to oppose it. J2EE application servers will finally become more modularized (buy only what you need) and Java developers will be able to think about enterprise applications in terms of a combination of OSGi bundles, some developed by the user and others supplied by vendors - all of which work seamlessly together and support dynamic deployment and update capabilities.

4.  Resource oriented computing, aka REST, will finally start to gain serious traction (see also No. 1), although its rabid adherents won't be satisfied with what will be less than total domination (yes Virginia, people will still be using Web services, too).  Vendor and user support is on the rise, and more and more people will understand how to take advantage of this powerful architecture. Enterprise applications will start to include both service oriented and resource oriented capabilities. OSGi based infrastructures (see also No. 3) will help the Java world combine both sensibly.

5.  Microkernel-based architectures and lightweight containers will grow in popularity as people gain experience with SOA based project design, development, and deployment and understand the benefits of "just the right amount of software for an SOA."  SOA deployment strategies based on grid and virtualization technologies will also become widely adopted, since lightweight containers lend are well suited to them, although the industry will continue to fight over the definition of "grid" since Oracle and IBM have widely divergent approaches.  

6. The battle for social networking prominence will be played out in 2008 as MySpace, Facebook, Plaxo, and LinkedIn position themselves for enterprise use.  As the "IM generation" enters the workforce they are going to expect in the corporate environment support for familiar social networking technologies, encouraging corporations to figure out how to incorporate them into business culture, but one or perhaps two winners will emerge from the battle in 2008.  Meanwhile expect employees to hedge their bets by taking out pages on multiple sites, causing confusion in the short term over which site to favor. .

See next pages for predictions from: Bill Roth, BEA Systems; Brad Abrams, Microsoft; Kevin Hoffman, iPhone Developer's Journal; Ian Thain, Sybase; Yakov Fain, Farata Systems.