Registered: Apr 2001
Location: New York
Posts: 492

A new year...

While the year 2001 was a difficult year, nevertheless, one bright spot was that it was a banner year for object-oriented software.

Some of our 2001 favorites:

+ C# and the CLI became a reality when Microsoft released the beta for Visual Studio .NET and an early version of Mono was released for Linux

+ Craig Larman published a thoroughly revised 2nd edition of Applying UML and Patterns

+ TogetherSoft released Together Control Center 5.5, a real powerhouse of a release with support for C# and SVG diagrams among many other notable features

+ IntelliJ released version 2.5 of IDEA, one of the best refactoring Java IDE's available today. IDEA faithfully implements many of the refactoring's in Martin Fowler's book Refactoring and sets the standard by which all other IDE's will be measured for this feature

+ Netscape 6.2 was released, the first stable browser built on Mozilla's C++ code base. Take a look at the source for one of open source software's biggest and best object-oriented programs

+ The Apache Batik project released version 1.1 of their excellent SVG tool set. Batik has been rapidly integrated as a component in tools such as TogetherSoft's TCC, allowing users to save UML diagrams as SVG files

+ Suggestions? Please add your year 2001 favorites for object-oriented software to this thread

Let's hope that the year 2002 brings world peace. Let's also hope that we see more of these exciting advances in object-oriented software!

Some of our blue-sky predictions for 2002 :

+ Wide spread integration of UML modelling with Java IDE's. We have already seen this happen with the new releases of Borland JBuilder and Oracle JDeveloper. Is IntelliJ next?

+ Broad adoption of built-in SVG support in major web browsers. This will facilitate the publishing of UML designs as web documents.

+ SVG will be supported by a number of UML tools vendors.

+ XMI interoperability will become a priority for UML tools vendors and true compatibility will be proven

+ EJB support in UML tools will become wide-spread and very useful for enterprise software designers

+ SOAP and WSDL web services design will become a new priority for UML tool support. Look for tool integration with open-source projects in this space such as Apache Axis

+ J2EE will continue to grow strong and Java based web services will proliferate. Many Internet sites will adopt JSP and servlet based services. Apache Struts will define the standard for patterns and frameworks which play in this space

+ Refactoring will be rapidly added to all of the major IDE's. Not just simple refactorings like rename variable, but also the full list of refactorings implemented already by IntelliJ

+ Java will adopt an open-source license in order to allow it to compete better with C#, which has been adopted as an ECMA standard. Expect the battle between Java and C# to really heat up on the server and on cell phones.

+ Python, Ruby and maybe even Eiffel will become more widely available and adopted once they are hosted on the .NET and CLI platform.

+ A UML tool will be released which is completely written in C#. We suspect that TogetherSoft will be the first to accomplish this by rewriting TCC in C#.

+ IBM will revise it's UML certification test based on excellent feedback from the Objects's by Design forum for UML Certification

If you have some blue-sky predictions yourself for object-oriented software, please add them to this thread!

Have a happy new year!

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