As part of one of my COM classes at school, I need to write a 2500 word research paper. The thesis of this paper is that the process of writing functional software has become much easier with the advent of sophisticated tools which are intended to make the software engineer’s life easier. I’ve been doing a significant amount of research at the University library and stumbled across an article from the June 10, 1996 issue of PC Week. The article was entitled, “Software slips out of the primordial ooze (the evolution of software development)”.

What caught my eye was the last line in the article:

Over time, browsers will not matter for Net applications – Java will. Java is the integration platform, and like Navigator plus plug-ins, we’ve now moved to Java plus ActiveX. We’re evolving. Darwin would be proud!

I’m not exactly sure why this made me chuckle as much as it did. Most likely because of how Ajax has really solidified the browser as an application container. More and more full-fledged applications are being made available to me via my web browser.

This is one of the reasons that software development field is so interesting. I cant wait to see how today’s current articles will look 10 years from now.