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30 Software Programming: the wheel of fortune In the final part of his series on computer programming, Anthony Seaton tries to predict the future. Figure 1. Conceptual model to show three levels of hardware topology Short of gazing into a crystal ball, careful analysis of current trends and their history is perhaps the most reliable indicator of what the future holds. Current trends in software are being driven by changes in hardware systems topology and infrastructure (Figure 1). The mainframe may now be reaching the end of its life. It is being replaced by smaller, faster servers, sometimes networked into clusters for resilience. That is not to say mainframe development has ceased, as the largest processors continue to grow. Meanwhile, on the desktop, growth in storage, speed and reliability also seems set to continue. With mainframes and servers at the hub, linked to desktop computers at the rim by network spokes, we can view the hardware environment as something like a wheel. The hub The massive Cray XT3 at AWE (Atomic Weapons Establishment) Aldermaston is probably the most powerful single machine in the UK, and argued by Cray to be the most powerful in the world. This is a claim that IBM might dispute, their contender being the blue gene. Apart from these beasts, almost the only mainframes now produced in any volume are those from IBM. These offer parallel sysplex, the means to divide the machine into logical partitions (LPARs), each of which can be assigned to run almost any operating system you care to show it. There is no restriction here, either to prehistoric legacy systems or cuttingedge development. This offers plenty of scope finally to move away from IBM’s own systems software and the associated costs. The likes of Amdahl and ICL became part of Fujitsu, which has followed Sun Microsystems in the production of large-scale servers running Solaris on SPARC processors. Sun itself offers the Sunfire E20K, which ‘scales up to 72 processors with 144 threads and up to 576GB memory for heavily threaded commercial applications’. Sun differs from IBM in offering world-class system software and development tools free, with plenty of scope for cutting-edge systems development. One of the largest express delivery and logistics firms in the UK has retained its structure of IBM mainframe, HP Unix servers and PC front-ends, but has spent the last few years migrating from COBOL systems running under OS/390 on the mainframe and C++ under HP-UX on HP-9000 series servers, to running Linux across the board and redeveloping all of its software in Java. As well as improved performance, this has enabled a very considerable saving in software licensing costs. Running Suse Linux on an LPAR of its IBM z990 mainframe, it has switched to Red Hat on its HP servers. At the centre, many large organisations are now migrating from mainframe technology altogether, replacing it with servers, superservers and clusters. Many small to medium-sized enterprises have taken the path towards object-oriented enlightenment, be it with C++, VB using objects, or Java. As new releases of Microsoft’s Visual Studio become more widely adopted, this trend looks set to continue. From where I sit, this is no bad thing. Object-orientation, when competently applied, can lead to very elegant software solutions. At the database level, SQL is currently by far the most widely used query language. For the technical author, this means entity-relationship diagrams and subsequent representation at table and query level. Programming at the back-end, server-side or back office (whichever is your organisation’s preferred term) is often done largely in-house. Code may be written in whatever language was popular when major changes were last made, from pre-Y2K legacy software to state-of-the-art, object-oriented offerings using advanced fourthgeneration languages. The spokes More than ever before, software is key at the networking level. The concept of networking being simply cables, modems, racks and routers is history. A growth area, the network layer now includes all manner of software technology. Internet technology is everywhere. Since most organisations would now be lost without it, most have seen the sense in using similar conventions within intranets of any significant size. ASP (active server pages) web-tier code allows a higher degree of interaction with the host Communicator Spring 2006
31 server than simply displaying pages and running hyperlinks and crude e‐mail tags at the clientside. Websites using ASP can be dynamically updated and enable users to run queries against a database on the server-side. Since the birth of its .NET paradigms, and particularly ASP.NET, ASP has tended to be uttered in the same breath as Microsoft. XML (extensible markup language) works in a similar way but is wider ranging, being a cuttingedge W3C project. Described as ‘the glue that holds the whole thing together’, XML offers the power to communicate with the client or user through HTML, with a wide range of languages, platforms and applications on the server-side. It seems well oriented towards the future, its potential for interactivity with mobile telephones continues to grow, with the development of Voice XML, for example. Given the degree of artificial intelligence needed to identify words spoken in different accents, this is indeed a marriage of technologies crossing several schools of thought and programming paradigms. Many organisations now boast quite elaborate intranets, which may be likened to in-house internets, ensuring that the most up-to-date information is available to every employee, from a staff handbook to a whole library of development or teaching resources. An intranet may also provide access to a large, central document repository. The rim At the rim of our wheel, some might say Microsoft is everywhere. Agreed, Microsoft is big, powerful, and influential. However, there are alternatives in the form of Macintosh, Unix, SPARC or Linux. The open-source movement is somewhat dichotomous; on the one hand, it wishes nothing more fervently than to perfect Linux as the antidote to Microsoft Windows, while on the other it seeks to make products like Open Office as Microsoft-compatible as possible. For the web programmer, the user-end of web development is likely to see the further evolution of HTML, cascading style sheets and scripting languages, used for both Internet and intranets. For the application programmer, love it or loathe it, there is little doubt that Microsoft’s Visual Studio is here to stay and has a significant future, especially with its evolving manifestations of VB and C. The latest .NET versions of Visual Studio aim to consolidate the principles of object orientation to a much greater extent. VB.NET and C#.NET are among the rising stars on the UK job market at time of writing. Visual J# (the Java derivative), however, has fallen rather flat. This appears to be good news for Sun Microsystems, since Java is still in greater demand than any other programming language. That the demand for ASP.NET is about 22% higher than for ASP suggests that there is, at least, some mileage left in this incarnation. Figure 2. UML use case model to represent a payroll system However, I won’t commit myself to a prediction either way. Will Microsoft ever achieve total domination? I consider it unlikely, given the proliferation of platforms hosting other operating systems. Will Microsoft be marginalised? Not in the foreseeable future, although one can only wonder what will become of a Microsoft without Gates. The impact on authors With the advent of large-scale application of object-oriented paradigms, came the need for more sophisticated representation of requirements analysis, process flow, collaboration, component deployment, sequence and structure than was available using traditional flowcharts. Figure 3. Project development lifecycle Communicator Spring 2006
Page 1 and 2: Communicator The Institute of Scien
Page 3 and 4: Contents Communicator The quarterly
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