The year of technological letdowns, GOODBYE 2016!
Thankfully it is almost behind us. This year, 2016, was the year of exploding Tablets and technological let-downs. One could almost say we’ve reached a point of technical regression. We have high-end gaming cards that get BRICKED in a few short months, we have hot smartphones that may just explode someday, and most of all we have disappointment.
Looking at application development in Java what we’re seeing is the reordering of chaos. I can’t recall any advancements or even significant bug-fixes this year. Java 8 has yet to fully take hold in web development and software development which is simply too hard to watch. Java 9 promises to bring us closer to modular design but when you see they will likely not be including OSGI support it seems unlikely 2017 will fare much better. We are seeing a vague transition from Spring DM to Blueprint which as a web developer appears to be a technological leap backwards. Another great Java technology, Apache Camel appears to be largely sidelined, another technology apparently released before its time. Java progress has been much like watching a Turtle cross the road, it is moving so slowly that it may just get run-over, and replaced, before ever reaching the next stage of progress.
Looking at the web development field we are also seeing a lot of stagnation. Web designers are at least creeping away from flat designs but we’re now facing web pages which are 99% background image, I recall seeing similar web sites in the mid 90s and other than the improved loading times I don’t see much improvement there. Sure we have responsive designs and a few fleeting micro-animations like shaking or flips but that’s about it. The full power of HTML 5 and CSS 3 are lying dormant and nearly untouched. A great deal of progress has been made with WebGL and ThreeJS for advanced visual and 3D effects but this is a fringe of advanced web development that is far from mainstream. Many devices don’t yet even support the technology. Where are our voice controlled talking web sites, and our smooth 3D animations? I know exactly where they are, they are in the very long lines of unfunded projects making 2016 a year of perfect disappointment.
