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From Chapter 1:
Application architecture is the key enabler-and key limiting factor-of the value an IT product or service can provide. It determines the structure and function of the media to be used in connecting sources of digital value to the consumers of that value. Software architects, entrepreneurs, and investors seeking to exploit the possibilities of the ongoing growth in the information technology arena need a working knowledge of application architectures.
The future state of application architectures is by no means cast in stone. If the Internet revolution continues, either J2EE or .NET may become the framework of choice, with radically different implications for how applications are structured. Conversely, if economic conditions worsen and organizations can't justify new infrastructure investments, the Internet revolution may stall, and something akin to the current status quo may prevail for some time to come.*(See note below)
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* At the time this report was written, the low-budget application architectures that are in common use today were just coming together or were still in the dream phase, and J2EE seemed to be the only serious Open Source contender to dethrone Microsoft from its position of dominance. While the Java language itself was not truly Open Source, it was possible to build enterprise applications using Java J2EE and such Open Source tools as Eclipse, MySQL, JBoss, Subversion, and Maven, among many others.
The Open Source alternatives that emerged over the ensuing years include the LAMP platform (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP), Ruby On Rails, Python TurboGears, Content Management Systems like Zope and Plone, social networking sites like FaceBook and MySpace, and collaborative filtering applications like Delicious. This is as example of the resilience of scenario planning, in spite of the failure to foresee the sudden proliferation of alternatives.
One of the driving forces I listed in 2002 was "The Reactive Nature of the Open Source Movement", about which I wrote:
Open Source software has thus far been developed reactively. Once commercial players establish the viability of a market and begin to exact the toll they require to please their stockholders and feed their R&D efforts, Open Source activities develop that attempt to provide free replacements for commercial components. Only in the arena of low-level software tools such as XML libraries and languages like Perl and Python does one see a glimmering of creativity and proactive thinking. Moreover, Open Source efforts seem unable to "get it" when it comes to user productivity software; existing Open Source office application suites and application frameworks are generally cumbersome and inadequate, and enterprise application framework alternatives don't even appear to be on the drawing board yet.
This situation need not continue forever, though. If the Open Source Movement were to lose its "grunt coder" mindset and its consequent reactive orientation and begin to attack higher-order problems with the same zeal that led to Linux and Apache, great things are possible. Such a turn of events would bode well for applications-oriented product and service companies, and bode ill for tools-oriented product companies.
Clearly the Open Source world did learn to understand user productivity software, and it goes beyond the Web 2.0 movement. As I write this, Open Office, Sun's free application suite, has been released by IBM under the brand name "Lotus Symphony". J2EE did not compete with Microsoft's .NET as well as it could have, but the Web 2.0 revolution came in from the sidelines to create a world in which high network bandwidth is becoming ubiquitous and Open Source is thriving, much like the "Caffeine Nation" scenario I described in this paper.
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