More Hot Technology Trends

I would like to rework (extend) my list of hot technology trends a little bit after having some interesting conversation. I definitely need to address:

• Concurrency in a multi-core computing environment. This is basically an area where relief is needed. Existing solutions, either implicit or explicit, are not sufficient from my point of view. Not sufficient because of the complexity and the resulting learning curve for developers. In today’s world of mainstream development, many underlying details pertaining to the processor architecture are hidden by abstraction layers and programming models. Handling lock-free programming is not a piece of cake. I would expect that chip maker and RAD/Compiler manufacturer come up with a smart approach to handle this. And I’m not talking about functional languages …No question that this is needed. A constant increase in computing power based on higher “GHz’s” is limited by physical barriers. More cache is no way out. Server applications will handle this by load balancing. But desktop applications are different. Graphical centered applications (picture, video) and other complex computing stuff will need a robust concurrency concept/framework on all these dual-core, quad-core boards soon.
  
• Sure, virtualization. Virtualization is basically everywhere, on the boards, within operating systems and as add-on products. The solutions are different in their concepts and the market is fragmented and sometimes confusing. But virtualization is a cool technology with a lot of promising use cases.
  
• RFID-Tags are sneaking into many areas - industry, retail, and simply into out privacy (à ID’s, passports). A critical success factor will be the security aspect of such solutions. People care about the privacy of their information which includes positioning and profiling.
  
• Widgets, Offline-Web-Apps, Local Web-Server (all this related to the Web-OS) – I will write about this in more detail soon.