Global
The CTO (Chief Technology Office) Associates is a forum of Ness’s technical stars across all Ness Innovation Centers, who are available to tackle global, technology-focused challenges outside their regular day job. This team regularly solves insanely hard technical problems and provides subject matter expertise for Ness customers; they write technical articles that promote thought leadership, develop accelerators for nascent strategic technologies and contribute to Open Source projects. They help drive a culture of technical excellence within the Ness engineering ecosystem, and represent a valuable resource for our customers: access to Ness’s collective brain power.
We asked the CTO Associates to anticipate the hot technical trends for the coming year.
Here are some of their thoughts on the Technology Trends for 2018:
Daniel Nanut, Senior Software Engineer
- I think that Kotlin is going to have the biggest growth in programming languages for the next Why?
- It’s much simpler than Java.
- Full interoperability with Java.
- Fast compile times (working for the last years with Scala, I can really appreciate this).
- It is officially supported by Google to develop Android apps.(https://developer.android.com/kotlin/index.html). Considering the legal tussle between Google and Oracle over the Java language, it would not surprise me if Google switches completely to Kotlin.
- It can target Javascript (you can have a React app written in Kotlin) and native code (this part landed recently and still needs to be test-driven).
- I think that the next language to watch is TypeScript.
- For large projects it is the sane way to tackle complexity.
- More and more open source projects are using it instead of plain Javascript (like Angular).
- Again, it brings sanity on the backend if you use NodeJS.
- It is well supported by Microsoft
- Another language that will continue to grow is Python, because of the intense interest surrounding machine learning, deep learning and investments in AI (Artificial Intelligence).
Ilie Halip, Architect
I see Rust becoming an important language. It has quickly become a major systems programming language because it can guarantee safe memory access at runtime by doing compile-time analysis. Some of the important problems it claims to detect at compile-time are: memory leaks, double frees, invalid pointers and even data races between threads. I expect a growing adoption for Rust in 2018, even in the embedded world, due to its supposed speed and efficiency improvements and the fact that it can easily interface with the C language commonly found in embedded systems.
Iulian Dogariu:Principal Engineer
- Serverless is gaining traction quickly. Serverless apps will show up more often, especially in the long tail of apps that see infrequent use or low data volumes.
- Backend-as-a-service products will see increased adoption (e.g., Auth0, Google Firebase), as companies look to shift an internal overhead to a reliable and easy-to-budget external partner. We will see the emergence of new kinds of backend-as-a-service products, with AWS leading the pack. But, a standard for functions-as-a-service will not be established in the coming year, so concerns about the downsides of vendor lock-in will not yet disappear in 2018.
- Native apps are losing ground to progressive web apps, because they are more expensive to develop and to put in the hands of consumers. And mobile browsers are constantly improving, which means progressive web apps are able to showcase more complex and useful features. We will probably see the tipping point in the second part of 2018, when Apple is expected to reveal iOS version “12” with service workers added to Safari – a massive boost for progressive web apps, but perhaps a challenge to Apple’s App Store Revenues.
- React will make gains at the expense of other UI frameworks. React’s 2017 relicensing to MIT removed a big non-technical hurdle for its adoption and many others will now follow. The emergence of React-native makes React a contender for becoming the de-facto standard for building rich UIs for both web and native experiences.
Daniel Masarik, Lead-Development
- Kubernetes (and related tools) has become the default ecosystem for containers. Just a few weeks ago at the AWS re:Invent conference, Amazon announced it has joined Google and Microsoft on the Kubernetes bandwagon, with the introduction of AWS Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes.
- Kubernetes has also recently become a part of the Firefox Quantum project – an ongoing effort to rewrite parts of Firefox in Rust. The first Quantum release (57.0) happened at the start of December 2017 and the speed gains are significant: https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/11/14/introducing-firefox-quantum/.
Sagar Mahapatro, Lead-Development:
I think one of the hottest and most disruptive technology trends in 2018 is going to be blockchain. It has already captured the imaginations of tech enthusiasts as the underlying technology of Bitcoin and hundreds of other “altcoin” (alternative coin) cryptocurrencies, like Litecoin and Dogecoin. 2018 is going to be the year when blockchain applications will go beyond currency, finance, and markets, and make inroads into other areas like government, enterprise, health care, science and IOT security.
Vishnudas Lokhande, Senior Software Engineer:
My predictions for OpenSource would be:
- Open Source ForgeRock products (Access Management, Identity Management, Directory Services and Identity Gateway) will gain in popularity for authentication, authorization, federation, API security and Internet of things. https://www.forgerock.com/
- Open Source WSO2 products such as API management, Integration (Service bus), IOT and Analytics will develop a growing audience. https://wso2.com/
With their deep technical knowledge and real-world experiences working on a diverse range of forward-looking technology projects for customers across sectors, the Ness CTO team is not afraid to make bold predictions in an ever-evolving enterprise technology landscape. We’ll check back in a year to see how skilled this team is at predicting the future.
