Components components all around ...

We are now moving towards more organized application development process. This has been made possible due to the presence of well designed frameworks which bring with them best-practices and turn recommendations into required features. Such a development happens when designers and developers focus on building blocks for the application in a well planned manner. These components are reusable object and interact with each other for implementing the desired functionality. XML is now serving the role of integrating these components, facilitating exchanges of information between components, providing validation and controlling application flow. There is a huge market for such components. Organizations are now focusing on different verticals but a lot needs to be done on the horizontal front as well. The good thing for computer people is that it requires less effort and things are more predictable in horizontals. This is still to be conquered and has lots of scope.

This new paradigm is also bringing with it a new software role – integrators. These will be the people who will study different frameworks and components available for there domain. Unlike software engineers, these are right people to build software for them. I believe that the person who knows what he needs from a computer program is the only right person to build it. And this is what used to happen when computers were new. If a physicist wanted to compute the result of some of his findings he would code it, he never went to a software engineers. But yes he needed the OS, libraries and languages built by software people.

Availability of GUI tools will make it very easy for integrators to built applications. AI will make things more manageable and predictable for them.

The role of software engineers will focus on building components for the verticals and horizontals. This will ease their lives too – instead of building large and complex systems, they will focus on a well defined goal.

Welcome to the world of organized software practices.

XML and type checking

A lot has been talked about XML – its benefits and how it simplifies application development and integration.

XML has brought a new application development. This facilitates declarative programming which was considered unique to SQL and other 4G languages.

This paradigm is now irradiating type checking and hence introducing loosely typed data usage. Its only when such applications are run, you see the crash screen..

Ecosystem providers should take this into account by following either of these approaches
1. Use DTD or schemas in addition to some validation mechanism to ensure type checking
2. Use XML only for integration with external system.

… more on this later …