I saw this on CrunchNotes a few days back, and it got me thinking…

I am happy to see that there is more recognition of the ‘information overload’ problem. Though my worry is in a different direction - that of the increased push for Job Specialization.

I remember being told that it was hard for our parents to imagine TV’s when they where kids, and today computers and interactivity have clearly changed work and entertainment. How are things going to change in the next 20-30 years?

And beyond pure technology, as the planet is made smaller politics will likely bring surprises as well…

So the million dollar question is: how can we be prepared for this change?

I was a little curious about the Rich Ajax Platform (RAP) project and attended the tutorial at EclipseCon ‘07. I left realizing that it is one of the cooler technologies being built today. The tutorial and the accompanying material were very well done. I talked to the Innopract guys to make sure that the material is online - they are currently available as seperate attachments to the bug report here and will hopefully make there way to the tutorial abstract soon.

I am excited about RAP and GWT for a couple a reasons: RAP and GWT let developers build rich applications without worrying about the boundaries of the different client and server platforms that the built app will be deployed on. Further, these projects allow for a whole generation of compile-time type and errors checking that are typically not caught by JavaScript development environments.

The other interesting thing about these two projects is that they represent two ends of the spectrum: GWT looks at running most of the code on the browser side as JavaScript, while RAP looks at running most of the code on the server side. I am looking forward to the next step - tooling that will allow me to implement an app, and then describe in an ad-hoc fashion as to which parts of the code need to run on the server and which parts are to run on the browser.