Software Production Lines

Having been a part of the software industry in the last 2 years, I could not help noticing a radical change thats taking place in the industry. The pronounced impact of this change is on the developers and those that are still playing technically inclined and find themselves in the software services industry.

Gone are the days when an Architect was required to have an understanding of all the technologies involved and the developer needing to be skilled enough to deliver the solution. We are walking into the SOA age and developers are working on very high level languages.

Some of the tools that i have had a chance to work on like TIBCO BW, SAP XI or an Oracle BPEL PM and many more on the same lines like Savvion, Pega, Fuego, Staffware etc that are in the market, provide you with GUI's and require you to just drag and drop images and build entire flows.

With SOA coming into the picture and each application / end point being exposed as a web service, enterprise integration is just a matter of dragging and dropping a sequence of activities in the right order. What would normally take a design phase and almost 10 days of development can now be completed within 30 minutes. Ofcourse this is not to say these products are perfect and do not introduce any bugs, but what they have achieved is the ability to produce mass software within no time.

This has helped software service providers to set up a software development production line where you can deploy a huge number of resources and can still develop exactly the same quality of software rapidly.

Will knowledge still have a say in the years to come? Or will it just be a software production line with yet another 'resource' being required to meet deadlines.

If the count is all that is going to matter, India and China certainly have a lot to look forward to.

B2B

Yes, Back 2 Bangalore. Got here a few weeks back and waiting to catch up with life et al. Something that i havent done in the last few months.

Just want to thank all u guys(yes,even the fellows who come here and post ad's), for visiting whats been a dead blog over the last few months.

Blummy

Been really busy shifting cities :(. Landed myself back in india earlier this week. Settled down and rearing to go atlast!! :)

Came across this excellent tool that lets you access your favourite web services at the click of a mouse button. Its extremely simple and neat.

Check it out!!!

Is this MS Office's Last Mile?

This is in light of some of the events that have happened in the last few weeks, like the Google-Sun Agreement and some applications/technologies that are very much being talked about(like Thinkfree, AJAX Office Suite etc).

Microsofts Key Strength is the popularity of its Office Suite. We have had a number of free Office Suites like the OpenOffice, Staroffice etc who have not been able to make any significant dent on Microsoft.

Microsofts Office formats like the .doc, .xls and .ppt are still very much closely guarded within the walls of the Redmond giant. While the Word 97 format was publicly documented, all updates to those formats have been withheld from the public domain. The format documentation is however available to Microsofts partners.

These formats are Microsofts strength. Their popularity have forced competitors to support these formats(atleast to extent of the documentation openly available).

As long as Microsoft continues to guard these formats, it will be indeed quite a daunting task to displace Microsoft from its pedestal as the Market leader.

Word 2003 however has an option to use a publicly documented schema called WordProcessingML and Microsoft has stated that it will soon be supporting an XML based format on all its Office products.

The rationality behind this move is tough to explain. In fact, its tough to understand. Im sure the guys at Redmond have their reasons. But yes it certainly will give competitors to have a go at the giant.

There is also the danger of a web based application suite (like thinkfree) gaining popularity over a desktop based application suite.

However having had a chance to use Microsofts web interface to its exchange servers(Outlook) and having seen their browser based implementation of Microsoft Outlook, Im sure competition will have to really get their act together to pose any real threat to the giant from Redmond.

Online office!!!

I'd mentioned an AJAX based office suite that'd let you do all your word processing using a browser.

Thinkfree lets you do exactly that. I am still in the process of installing plugins that'll let me use it. But its a wonderful service and will definitely find a lot of takers.

OJOS is on its way

Ojos is here atlast. Almost here!!!
Munjal Shah has posted a few snap shots of whats to come on his blog and it certainly does look good.

Can't wait to get my hands on this one.. :)