Trends in 2010 and beyond

Its another new year and the start of the next decade for the internet and some interesting new stories have hit the net already in 2010. One very popular pastime for many in January in the blogosphere is to look into the crystal ball and predict future trends. And as with most predictions this time of year, some are just a logical progression or evolution of an idea, others are nothing short of guesstimates of the future. But in both cases it is fun to speculate on what will happen in the future and then look back and see how good a fortune teller you can be. If someone told me last week that a terrorist would board a plane and try to set off a bomb in his underwear, I would have called him crazy. But plenty of people predicted that there would be a terrorist attack on a plane this past year, that just seemed statistically probable based on prior attempts, and easy to deduce because its such a general prediction. Since I know that I have no special powers to look into the future, I will stick to logical trends I see that are a natural evolution of ideas for the PHP web in 2010.

THE INTRANET IN YOUR POCKET TREND - is a clear one for everyone to see since we have been in the middle of this trend since the first PDA’s were introduced 17yrs ago, (hint for you are a history buff - Newton was also an Apple product with limited modem connectivity back in the beginning) and now with the next gen of mobile web devices, everyone should be preparing for PHP web applications that will also fit in both form factors, PCs as well as mobile phone /tablet devices. There are far more phones then computers, and the smartphone will eclipse the PC as the dominate device to cruise the web. PHP has been a leader in this mobile space also, as some of the most popular iPhone apps come from some popular PHP sites you probably know very well. If you’ve ever used facebook or anyone of Zynga’s social games (FarmVille, Mafia Wars, Live Poker, etc.) you are already using some of the most popular iphone apps that are written with PHP backends. There are plenty of other examples, the big trend in 2010 mobile will be the explosion of enterprise apps for the iPhone and other tablets/smart phones like Google’s Android. Again most of this driven by smartphone's web browser and accessing corporate web apps built for smaller screen templates. I think PHP systems had the biggest customer growth so far on the iPhone because it was such an agile environment to take Web and Social Networking ideas and implement them quickly. For the enterprise, the mobile enable FOSS application will be helping to bring these same advantages to internal resources and information. Did you know the most popular PHP opensource blogging app Wordpress is on the iPhone already? So is Drupal, it has an iPhone template, so does Magento, SugarCRM, and Moodle, etc. This makes it easy for enterprises to make the web application ready right out of the box with these PHP applications. I predict that there will be many many more free opensource PHP apps with smartphone optimized templates that make intranet resources and content accessible to the mobile workforce. Wonder what SugarCRM would be like if it tracked field workforce via mobile GPS?, UPS is already doing something like this with its field force. This and other mobile enabled enterprise apps will be a key focus for enterprises in 2010. And yes, I know that these smartphones have a zoomable web browser for any website to work, but making it truly optimal for the small form factor to collect statistics from the road, or get reports on the road via touchscreen typing/voice lookups will require tweaking of most intranet app GUIs to be road warrior ready and useful.

MORE OPEN THEN CLOSED BUSINESS TREND – This trend has been getting a lot of press in the mobile web space lately also. As many experts are talking about the Google/Apple wars, and predicting that Google’s more open Andriod will ultimately hurt Apple’s more proprietary iPhone system. Even though I’m an Apple fanboy, I must also agree with this prediction as history has proven in the past the right mix of Open and Proprietary is the key to business success longterm. I was watching Cramer on MSNBC today who tried to tell investors that its not an either/or death match between Apple/Google, but I disagree it will ultimately shake out to one of them owning 60% or more of the smartphone market, and the others with the rest. It happened to Apple ][ that dominated personal computers until the more open IBM PC took over, then again the more closed MAC .vs. more openly available Windows on any PC. As a smart man said once, “it’s déjà vu all over again” and will happen again with smartphones. More open systems tend to compete better in free markets, and is one of the reasons most closed and proprietary firms are opening up and releasing projects based on open source. Even Microsoft has spent a lot more resources on open source initiatives this past year and on windows PHP in particular. Enterprises and Government agencies are also betting big on open initiatives in the new year, leveraging open source projects like Wiki’s, Blogs, and CMS’s inside the firewall. Some of the most popular open applications on the web are PHP apps and in 2010 I hope to see a few new ones and updates of popular ones. If last years batch is any indication of what will be released this new year, it’s going to be very exciting. I also predict new Zend Framework open source apps to be announced in 2010, it has become the most popular PHP RAD framework so I think we are at a tipping point in the community now to see the next generation of free open source apps based on it to come out. Remember the first app that was designed in the beta version of Zend Framework by IBM back in 2007, it was called QEDWIKI and other projects like Magento have since gone public to great success and acclaim. What open source Zend Framework ideas will we see in 2010 I do not know, but I talk to many internet leaders who are releasing great Zend Framework based ideas commercially every week.

BAD ECONOMY in 2010 =MORE IT AUTOMATION TREND - ok so this one is another easy trend to spot, I promises you I’m working up to my best predictions in this article like a countdown they will get more futuristic as you read on. But I do envision a continuation of automation because of the bad economy that will continue in 2010 and will make IT automation projects even more important to the bottom line. PHP is great at exchanging data as a client or a server in SOAP, REST and XMLRPC for automation of system to system communication. Webifying client/server and mini/mainframe apps will also be accelerating this year. Rapid Application Design will be a focus for most firms where PHP excels and Zend Framework /developer solutions (and other PHP frameworks) improve the productivity of your staff and quality of the web projects. Of course I’m biased to Zend’s developer suite as it’s a complete, well integrated and powerful solution for enterprise development, check out the new capabilities we just rolled out at end of 2009 and some beta videos of 2010 advances here for a look at our future versions.

UTILITY COMPUTING TREND – In a past life I worked for Loudcloud that was an early pioneer for utility computing in the data center. This was before vmware and cloud computing like xen, and the benefits to fully managed servers as a utility from a business standpoint was very compelling even back then. It was in its infancy at Loudcloud but many advances since 2000 have made managed virtualization and cloud services easier to implement, more economical and a standard in >90% of the fortune 1000 datacenters. PHP applications and architecture easily scales in this new more dynamic utility compute environment. PHP has a simpler architecture then Java app servers so its easier to implement, and scale and build dynamic web businesses in virtual and cloud environments. This is one reason VMware acquired springsource this past year as it’s a harder problem to manage and solve in Java then it is in PHP. With Zend PHP in the cloud, you will be able to take one of the oldest FOSS projects on sourceforge.org (SquirrelMail developed in 1999) and deploy it on the Amazon EC2 cloud or VMware clusters, can you do that to a Java app written in 1999 without recoding?

We here at Zend also made some new advances to ensure PHP web applications can take advantage of the specialized cloud services without locking the web app from working on only one service, so you could build a PHP app that can work across all the many cloud services and virtual datacenters without having to recode it for each. I have a few customers who have a mixed, inside outside cloud strategy and want to build a single codebase that can be deployed on internal VMware and external cloud services like Azure or EC2, but taking advantage of database service or queueing services are different in all the offerings today. And as more services are released this problem only grows for web enabled cloud computing. Our ZendPHP/partner cloud initiative is called SimpleCloud API and the software will support IBM, Microsoft, Rackspace, Amazon, Nirvanix, VMware and GoGrid services. I predict that Zend will announce new capabilities to help make management and monitoring in a cluster far easier for PHP apps. Ok, so this is more of insider information then forecast but stay tuned for our upcoming Zend Server 5.0 bundled capabilities in this space also.

SITUATIONAL APPS DRIVE GOV OSS ADOPTION TREND – New types of data are become realtime on the web. For example, today in California there was an earthquake, if you Googled it there was already references to people tweeting and blogging about it 2min after the quake. This is impressive, what other realtime data will you be able to search for in the future and what kinds of PHP ideas could be built to data mine the information that now will be available like this. Will someone create a mobile app to measure the public’s reaction to statements made by elected officials so that the message could be tweaked faster and refined. I bet Janet Napolitano could have used such an app after she made her comments that the system was working from the attempted Christmas day bombing. Maybe she would have quickly followed up in the next news briefing with a refined message if she was using such an application. This type of statistical web apps and situation management solutions are become very important to the US government, they are known as "Situational Apps" and there are a lot of PHP portals that could be used to quickly build these types of portals for government employee's to manage and respond to certain critical situations. An example would be an online work environment (think of it as a private portal/social network) used to improve US security procedures used by cross functional US agencies involved in the Christmas day bombing scenario. And the participants are both federal, local and commercial that are working together to fix this problem and what better online resource to keep these traditionally isolated groups working together, then the same technology that works out in the internet, open source PHP apps will be a key part of the solution I believe. If you viewed the QEDWIKI video earlier that's just one (non-gov) example of how PHP can build these easily, it was also the very first "Situational App Generator" that IBM created using Zend Framework and PHP back in 2007, there's been a lot progress since. Mindtouch project is a more current open source PHP based example that I like a lot for some of these also. This trend is still in its infancy in Washington, but I learned a lot about it when I attended GOSCON this past year. SO I predict that this will be a huge huge growth area for PHP business and the killer app for open source PHP adoption by the US government and other public agencies.

So let me end my article with at least one wayout 2010 prediction from the crystal ball. I predict that unlike the shoe bomber incident of last year that caused us all to have to take off our shoes at airport security, this year we will not be told to take off our underwear and place it on the conveyor for a scan. I know this is crazy talk, given how safe things have been since we all started taking our shoes off, but I fear that the underwear bomber scanning will cause more delays and possibly conceive more babies at airports if the TSA were to solve the problem the same old government way. I know, I know I really put myself out there on this last prediction, but we’ll revisit this in December 2010 and see how things shaped up.

If you have any observations you’d like to share about PHP or Zend product feature suggestions for the new year, please post them here, I’ll put some links of good posts I have read so far. Happy New Year