Java Testing and Design - 1.2 Web-Enabled Applications, the New Frontier

In this section, the author describes how software has been architected in the past.  The interesting point is how he sees the new emerging architecture, namely one where the desktop contains both presentation and some business logic but much of the business logic lies elsewhere, out on the web somewhere where it accessed by RESTful and SOAP APIs.  He believes that the driving force behind the new architecture are a set of "firsts":

• This is the first time in the information technology (IT) industry that software developers, QA technicians, and IT managers agree on interoperability architecture.
• This is the first time that developers, QA technicians, and IT managers agree that security needs to be federated.
• This is the first time that developers, QA technicians, and IT managers agree that scalability in every application is critical to achieving our goals.
• This is the first time that government regulation is part of our software application requirements.
• This is the first time that interoperability tools and technology is delivered with integrated development environment (IDE) tools
• This is the first time that Java and other interoperable development environments and open source projects have reduced operating system and platform dependencies to a point where, in many cases, it really does not matter any more.

In summary, now that we have standards, tooling and infrastructure that allow applications to inter-operate, so we'll be doing lots more of it.  I use a nifty little program called XBMC to serve up media files in my home.  One of its nicest features is its ability to show me information about the movie, TV show or song I'm thinking about playing.  It can do this because it can use the web, and its standard protocols, to mine the internet for information.  XBMC wouldn't be nearly as useful if it couldn't leverage the  data contained in other applications.