The Enterprise & Open Web Developer Divide
In this interesting Forrester post about embracing the open web Jeffrey Hammond highlights the presence of two different developer communities. In his words:
“…there are two different developer communities out there that I deal with. In the past, I’ve referred to these groups as the “inside the firewall crowd” and the “outside the firewall crowd.” The inquiries I have with the first group are fairly conventional — they segment as .NET or Java development shops, they use app servers and RDBMSes, and they worry about security and governance. Inquiries with the second group are very different — these developers are multilingual, hold very few alliances to vendors, tend to be younger, and embrace open source and open communities as a way to get almost everything done. The first group thinks web services are done with SOAP; the second does them with REST and JSON. The first group thinks MVC, the second thinks “pipes and filters” and eventing.”
Following the tech industry it is clear to me that this division is tangible and in fact I would suggest the gap is currently increasing. I recently started to revisit my open web development skills after it occurred to me how large this divide was beginning to get and how important these skills will be key in the future. Whilst the Enterprise developer often traditionally focuses deeply on a handful of technologies (too often from one Vendor) the Open Web developer is constantly learning new languages and choosing between best of breed open source frameworks to get the job done. The new Open Web developer has evolved from a different age and with different perspectives and in many ways leaving behind the rules/constraints of the Enterprise developer building typical Line Of Business (LOB) applications. I’m not suggesting that Enterprise developers don’t understand these technologies already, I assume many do, but they’re unlikely to be living and breathing them. This is not just about web development technologies and techniques, but more about mind-sets, architectural styles and patterns. Perhaps it can be viewed historically as similar to the evolution from mainframes to distributed computing, and this is just the next evolution. This movement compliments the emergence of cloud computing and one can assume that the social, dynamic LOB applications of tomorrow will rely heavily on the skills and technologies of the Open Web community. To quote Jeffrey again:
“In the next few years, their world is headed straight to an IT shop near you.”
The proliferation of devices, cloud computing and a new breed of ‘surfing since birth’ young blood entering the industry combined with the shift towards this new world from big players like Microsoft (e.g. using JavaScript to build Windows 8 apps) mean that Enterprise IT will have to converge with the Open Web approach in order to meet future consumer needs. Only the integration of these worlds will enable Enterprises to integrate their existing application landscapes with the new web based consumption model.
John R. Rymer’s Forrester post on the subject provides his view on the differences between these communities and his accompanying post details the technologies you need to focus on now (HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, REST). Whilst it can be tricky to follow this sort of fast moving decentralized movement, the good news is that now is a great time to get into these technologies with the growth of the umbrella HTML5 movement raising awareness within the industry and bringing some standards to advanced web design. Keep an eye on what the big web frameworks are offering, and track the innovations at companies like Google and Twitter. I recommend you read these Forrester articles and think about how this affects your architecture, IT organization and career.
For some quality content on these technologies check out these links: ‘Mozilla Developer Network’, ‘Move The Web Forward’ and ‘HTML5 Rocks’.