Here are eight changes in the conversation stream that I expect to see in 2010.  These conversation changers will alter what we talked about in 2009.  That doesn't mean the 2009 topics of conversation disappear or becomes less relevant - just that the conversation changes and popularity of the 2010 topics are or I think will be on a steep rise and some of them may even eclipse those of  2009.   However, many of them are simply a shift in the momentum of competing technologies.  Here are changes that I foresee happening :

iPhone/Android - There is no question that Apple's iPhone/iTouch devices will continue to have huge popularity and success. However, I think the conversation will change to Android-based devices.  Android is constructing a huge device ecosystem from cell phones to e-Readers - MP3 and Portable Media Players to Netbooks and more.  The economics and the implied interoperability is reminiscent of Windows.

Google/Bing - In a very short time Bing has achieved some fairly impressive results.  I think this is the beginning.   I think that the surprise will be how quickly Bing achieves substantial mindshare - next year is the year of Bing in search.  Google will have to respond.

MacOS X/Windows 7.  I think the arrival of Windows 7 will see a shift to a better form of Windows in large segment of the desktops out there.  MacOS X will continue to do well in various forms but Windows 7 has significant improvements over Vista and Microsoft has clearly fixed a lot of things.   The overall Windows 7 UI is significantly better and the OS is much more solid.  I think increasingly the conversation is about Windows 7.  Recently, I  worked on a project where I used Windows 7 and Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) tool.  RDP was a productivity win.  Working on multiple machines I was able to transparently view the server desktops and drag and drop folders and files easily between various systems.  Windows 7 was not the mess I thought it was in previous versions of Windows - it was actually reasonably productive.  I have Microsoft Office on two machines - one Mac and one Windows 7 machine (and yes I also have OpenOffice on these machines).  What I notice is the combination of Office and Windows 7 is really a pretty nice fit - they work in tandem and the tools compliment each other.  Office feels less productive to me on MacOS X.

Ruby/Rails and Groovy/Grails.  Ruby and RoR have garnered significant mindshare - but I think the combination of Groovy  have been garnering more interest (you can check out Google trends trends).  It isn't that simple.  I think Ruby currently has a substantially larger mindshare - but it is waning.  Groovy offers a Java.next approach that is attractive for developers searching for a turbo-charged, productive follow-on to the Java language.    In the quest for a better enterprise solution, Grails offers a framework built on Spring, Hibernate and Groovy.  This is a type  of  Java Web Edition that Sun should have offered years ago.  The fact that SpringSource offers professional services and support for Groovy and Grails is actually the piece of the puzzle that was missing before.

Rich Internet Application / Rich Client Platform.  Next year it will become more obvious - but have you noticed the large number of RCP applications that have popped up.  I follow NetBeans, but I suspect that something similar may be happening with Eclipse.  I think this year was the year of RIAs with the arrival of JavaFX, Flex/Flash and SilverLight.  I think it has dawned on a lot of developers that RIAs are limiting.  In my mind, they seem designed for graphic intensive web apps  - but most enterprise apps are data intensive.  Unfortunately I don't see JavaFX going anywhere until they fix it so that it can seamlessly support for  bi-directional interoperability and RCP interoperability is built into it.  I'm not saying that there won't be a lot of RIAs out there - just that they seem relegated to flashy, low-data graphics apps on web sites.

Laptop/Tablet.  I suspect Apple will probably hit a homerun with their rumored tablet, but, even if they don't there are some clearly interesting alternatives to the laptop coming in tablet form.  Despite the rough start, the JooJoo tablet looks pretty cool.  The tablets may turn into better eReaders than the existing Nook and Kindle.

MySQL/PostgreSQL.  Okay - so whatever happens out of the Oracle/Sun merger, I don't think it matters.  I think a lot of companies that chose MySQL to escape from the Oracle license fees are probably spooked and may be thinking about other options just about now.  It's not so much what Oracle will do as what they might decide not to do. It's an open source project that will be led by a company that competes with the largest revenue stream the company has.  I suspect there is probably some unease about what the longterm implications of the merger.  Other companies in the process of trying to decide what database to use  are probably taking a long hard look at PostgreSQL.  It's possible that MySQL will continue to flourish but  I think PostgreSQL will be one of the beneficiaries of the merger.  The other one may be Apache's CouchDB. 

JavaOne/Devoxx.  Okay - everybody seems to be talking about the fact that the JavaOne traditional call-for-papers has come and gone.  Amazingly, without a word from either Sun or Oracle - which I find amazing.  If it is Oracle's intention to merge it in to Oracle World - good luck. I see Devoxx as the new JavaOne if they do such a move.  I don't think that's a bad thing at all.  It is sad for me to see the demise of JavaOne - I've gone to almost every single one of them - but I think Devoxx is a really good replacement for it.

about why the best of possible worlds would involve Oracle building on top of the platform and moving JDeveloper's Oracle functionality over to NetBeans as  Platform modules.  It's not like we are talking a huge technology bridge - say like moving to an alien, native API - no  both NetBeans and JDeveloper are built using the Swing toolkit.  Get with it, Oracle.  Move your developers  to a great Java Platform solution and and the best IDE available.

[Update : I found this out just now, yet another very recent adoptee  of the NetBeans Platform, is NASA.  You can read the details here .]

If you look at this chart it does seem impressive. Really ? Does JDeveloper really have a larger community - uh no...anyone that has followed JDeveloper understands it's niche so now let's really spend time with this chart.  First, and as I said previously - a while back I gave up on the usefulness of  comparing the number of job postings of one IDE versus another relative to jobs. Why ?  Because the vast, vast  overwhelming majority of Java job postings don't bother specifying an IDE - so such a chart loses meaning.  I warned about this in the blogposting.  Now let's take the chart above and add total Java postings. 

Okay, now you understand.  Yes - that orange line that merges with the number zero is what Shay is saying is important, perhaps removing your attention from that solid green line that is not zero and shows the Java job postings.  The point is that specifying an IDE with Java makes sense only in a few contexts.   In fact, the only ones that do specify an IDE are companies have something very unique that needs to be done - something like Eclipse plugin development, NetBeans plugin development or JDeveloper ADF development. In other words, and according to the chart ... almost zero when comparing them to the total number of Java jobs.   The total number of jobs that are using Java dwarfs those jobs needing specific JDeveloper and NetBeans needs.   Shay's chart means nothing other than  companies needing proprietary APIs to be built such as ADF and Oracle APIs  need to specify that. With the exception of NetBeans RCP (which is open source) there is nothing to specify with regards to NetBeans (it's Java, Java EE, Java ME, Grails, Ruby, PHP, Python, etc that end up being specified that are pertinent to any NetBeans developer).  So I would completely expect there to be more Oracle developers dealing with a lot of proprietary Oracle APIs than developers building RCP apps - but at the end of the day it approaches zero when compared to the number of Java jobs.  As the evidence of the job posting chart show, the overwhelming majority of postings don't need to specify NetBeans, JDeveloper, Eclipse, etc.    So, this is why Shay's chart lacks meaning - it is stripped of the real information you need. [ update : Incidentally this isn't the only person/group that has posted this type of chart.  MyEclipse recently did the same thing and the results are the same as you can see from this graph.  Again, the vast Java job numbers result in the same thing, MyEclipse job numbers graphically merge with zero when compared to overall Java jobs. In the end, this type of marketing backfires when people find out what is happening. ]

Shay also attempts to explain why JDeveloper really does have a community.  Shay, I know it has a community but from every indication it doesn't seem to be very big and it is very, very focused on Oracle's proprietary products and APIs.  Since we mention surveys, personally, I like Developer.com's voting for Product of the Year - it doesn't pretend to be impartial - users simply vote for the products they use and like. Interestingly, NetBeans won the IDE of the Year last year. I didn't see JDeveloper on the runner's up list..anyway back to the topic at hand - the study you reference is, not surprisingly, skewed in a number of ways and well, we can all pick a favorite survey or study.   First,  it refers to Java IDEs - NetBeans does C, C++, RoR, Python, PHP, and bunch of other non-Java languages.  Which, of course, we know JDeveloper does not. So, with very little effort, you can see that JDeveloper playing in only the Java space is going to have less developers.   You can see from the next chart that there is more to software development than Java.  NetBeans does all those languages on the chart- and that ends up where JDevelopers falls down very badly -

Second,  while it is great that the survey of readership you refer to actually shows NetBeans has large usage (in this case 1/4 of the market - my guess is somewhere between 1/4 to 1/3)- my impressions are that the survey is probably wrong on a number of counts. The same company,  had actually done another study on  Eclipse usage which you can find on their site (relevant question is 24). So a couple of studies during the same time period with very different results and surveying the same readership, hmm.... I'm not sure I buy any of it.  By the way,  the other one shows NetBeans/Sun Studio (Sun Studio is the C/C++/Fortran version of NetBeans) at 21% and JDeveloper at 14%.  So that's a full -6% difference in the same year for JDeveloper. I tend to lend less credence to these surveys - especially if they have been paid for by somebody.  Call me cynical.

The point that is missed is that most reasonable people understand that NetBeans has a much larger community even if they use (questionable) readership survey numbers.   Oracle would be hopefully focused on addressing on how to make these communities larger and more vibrant.  I can think of a couple of ideas to do that.  One way is to announce real choice to your JDeveloper community by doing the following plugins for NetBeans :

So it  really does get more interesting - NetBeans and Eclipse also have a presence in other languages - let's pick C, C++ and Fortran.  How many people use JDeveloper for C and C++ ?  Eclipse  and NetBeans C/C++ developers do that everyday of the week. Besides the NetBeans C/C++ plugin, even more interesting is Sun's Studio, a sophisticated development environment for C, C++ and Fortran, it is written using the NetBeans core platform APIs.  By the way - this is an example of the notion of platform that JDeveloper misses - Sun Studio is not simply written with the NetBeans IDE - it is written to use the core Platform APIs that allow it to use a huge number of the core platform infrastructure that is found within NetBeans itself.

Now let's look at Ruby - does anyone spend anytime at all (is it even possible) to do Ruby development on JDeveloper  ?   They do on NetBeans.

Or PHP ? Check out NetBeans IDE for PHP.   Want to catch a movie about it ? Check the blog.

Even if you go and look at the Grails website of IDE's to use (as of this writing) - where is JDeveloper ?   Yes in one of the few areas JDeveloper allows you to write in nobody thinks to even put JDeveloper down because there are better choices in the form IntelliJ, NetBeans and Eclipse. You can find a NetBeans Groovy/Grails example on the Grails site

An then there are a large number of other languages where JDeveloper doesn't even have any IDE support.  Where is JDeveloper's support for Scala ?

In effect, developers that are forced into using JDeveloper are stuck on the ship of Oracle products and APIs - there is no getting off because they need support of those products and APIs.  It's not that JDeveloper is an awful product, it is a highly competent product for what it does - it is very good for a number of things - it is simply that there are better IDEs out there that have much larger, vibrant communities, that do more and support a larger set of developers and languages and offer core platform APIs.  It is that simple.  Oracle has an opportunity to create a set of Oracle plugins and features into NetBeans that support the Oracle product set and gain the support of a large community of developers.

This is why Oracle has missed a huge, huge  opportunity.