Mind Share
In the fast-paced, evolving world of software development keeping your developers engaged in your development platform will likely determine how successful your company can be. The reason is simple: Losing developers is a platform killer. Think Blackberry or Windows Phone. No apps means no customers.
Because of this companies spend enormous amounts of effort building tools, fostering communities and creating ecosystems that empower their developers’ creativity in order to woo them to their platforms, retain them and keep them engaged.
As you probably know, Oracle purchased Sun Microsystems in 2010, and one of Sun’s biggest assets was the Java programming language.
Java is one of the most widely used languages in the enterprise business software space, mainly for its robustness and scalability. Java is rigid and strict in nature, and developers using it put a lot of upfront thought into design, often using tools to plan the software before writing a single line of code. Strict languages also require a large and continuous learning investment by developers.
A strict language means better quality code and less errors found by your end-users during run time, which is the biggest benefit of compiled languages like Java.
In the last few years however, there has been a shift in the industry towards speed, ease of use and flexibility. There is a shortage of skilled developers and a huge demand for working products that can be ready quickly. Along with this, there has been a flood of new intuitive tools for testing software. These tools have advanced so much, that now you can automate all your testing, and gain confidence in the code not because of the upfront design, but because it has been thoroughly tested. In other words a product can be hastily written but trusted to work.
Many new development frameworks have been introduced that take advantage of this new market reality giving the developer new freedoms and less restrictions, making software much faster to write.
The new “generation” of developers coming up now in the age of Silicon Valley are much more likely to use these less rigid frameworks to build their applications quickly so that they can compete with each other.
Some of the biggest and most lucrative software on the planet do not use compiled languages. Facebook for example began with PHP and Twitter with Ruby on Rails. Java and other compiled languages are rapidly losing ground and “Mind share” to these new more intuitive languages and frameworks. It is likely only a matter of time before they also lose ground in the enterprise business software space because time to market is paramount and investment in software is expensive.
Even JavaScript, a previously very front-end focused language has now started to invade domains previously thought to be impenetrable, such as back-end development (Node.JS) and the data tier (MongoDB).
So where do we believe simplicityEngine fits here? We wrote the simplicityEngine back-end in pure Java, and we believe we have created a new, faster, visual way to develop software that also leverages Java’s robustness and scalability. We really think you can have the best of both worlds. With simplicityEngine developers can quickly link together pieces of well designed robust functionality into a working solution in real time.
Visit us at simplicityEngine.com and follow us on Twitter @simplicityEng
