According to Mr. Gonda, more realities than trends are to be expected for the future of technology. Facts show a path with no turning point as far as servers, database management systems, platforms, and XLM are concerned. Meanwhile, a strong trend is shown with the incorporation of Workflow to the systems development. "Dealing with workflows outside the programs has made decisions taken at development time independent of those that we must take at runtime. This is a very strong trend. The quality of the systems built using this process is higher and their life cycle is quite longer," said ARTech's President.
From the first database servers created almost 40 years ago, the tendency to use servers has continued to diversify and has settled. When I know nothing I do everything. As long as I start acquiring real knowledge I start separating the problems that I have already solved, so that I do not have to solve them each time they appear, and I search for some kind of automaton to solve my problems. Hence the servers, Gonda explained. Nowadays we see application servers, Web servers, Web Server servers, as well as email, image, signature verification, license validation, and certification servers& all kinds of servers.
Specifically, ARTech's President talked about metadata servers, whose importance is due to the fact that, by separating data from their description (metadata), they allow having an intelligent behavior at runtime, taking decisions at runtime, and not necessarily at development time.
He also mentioned another detachment from classic systems: workflow servers, by separating the workflow from the programs, have provided flexibility to make changes without demanding any modification to the programs.
Regarding database management systems, Gonda stated that the current SQL de facto and de jure standard is quite out-of-date for the year 2003. Regarding the other trends ( Pos-SQL, TRDBMS systems), object-oriented database management systems (OODBMS), Gonda suggested that the world might adopt the ORMSQL system (Object Relational Mapping) with SQL.
As far as intelligent databases are concerned, Gonda was quite clear: they will not exist in the foreseeable future. He explained that, as three players dominate this market: IBM with DB2 and Informix, Microsoft with SQL Server, and Oracle with Oracle, changing the standard is quite difficult. "Changes could come only if one of them renounces their rights to the standard, but no one will do this. Either because they do not want to or because they cannot or maybe because they do not dare to, they will not do this. Thus, in the foreseeable future, we will remain like this," Gonda added.
Gonda presented the XML (eXtensible Markup Language) as the great player at the end of the previous century and the beginning of the current one. "Everybody has adopted the standard, and this standard changes, simplifies and, to a certain extent, democratizes the world." Gonda added that it is a system of autodescribed messages that allows having an automaton, a generic program able to take any message, "understand" it and process it. One of its applications is the extended database. "I think that we will have a number of XML messages complementing the data that we have physically, and that we will be able to operate with them as easily and consistently as with the physical data in our database," ARTech's President said. The extended database includes my data, my clients and suppliers XML messages, and the messages of public or private Web Services, free or paid.
"This is very important. There may be a further step; for instance, this message may also have some special rules that must be observed during the process," ARTech's President commented. He also announced that ARTech has succeeded in using GeneXus intelligence to use completely strange and unorthodox databases, as if they were databases completely managed by GeneXus. "This will enable us to combine heterogeneous systems more easily; we will probably define dataviews on the XML messages and treat them as if they were part of the database managed by GeneXus or something like this. We are working on it," he informed.
"As far as platforms are concerned, there is no doubt: the market will be divided into two platforms: Java and Microsoft .NET," Gonda stated. The remaining questions regarding this matter refer to how rapid each of these options will penetrate the market and what to choose. Mr. Gonda proposes to choose the knowledge-based development, which is independent of the technology and the market changes.