Opinion: Data source neutrality and
designer/programmer collaboration highlight PDC introductions.
Twenty-one years ago, the first formal
software recommendation that I ever wrote was an in-house memo recommending our
company's adoption of a 2-year-old product (barely out of diapers) called
AutoCAD. That PC-based technical drawing tool had a solid foundation of
floating-point data representation for drawings over a wide range of real-world
size, combined with ease of customization with its internal programming tools,
but the deal-maker--as I presented it at that time--was in the ability of other
applications to generate ASCII files in the format that AutoCAD could render and
edit as drawings.
That was 12 years before the 1996
presentation of the first draft of what's now XML, but it's been worth the wait
to see this core idea of inter-application data exchange turn into the basic
premise of future enterprise information management. During that transition,
AutoCAD's vendor hasn't always been an exemplar of openness--but wherever I
look, things are moving in that direction, not only at Autodesk but also at
Microsoft.
I expected, back in the 1980s, soon to
see custom in-house applications performing engineering calculations and
generating AutoCAD drawings as their output, or taking drawing files as input
and producing bills of material and other project summaries and design analyses.
Last week, though, I saw AutoCAD used in a demonstration at Microsoft's
Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles that went beyond these hopes,
automating not only the draftsman's duties but also the component buyers' task
of going out for bids on alternative materials or other customizations--and also
feeding directly into visual presentations to the prospective online buyer. From
design requirement, to drawing, to end-to-end supply chain integration is a path
that I've long hoped to follow with mainstream off-the-shelf systems.
In his opening keynote at PDC, Chairman
and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates talked about the company's entry into
its third generation of XML, progressing from data storage through in-core data
representation to the fully integrated use of XML for data movement throughout
both the core and the application stack. The implications for programmer
productivity, and the resulting ease of delivering data in the way that's most
relevant to what the user is doing and in what context, are massive. Gates made
the two-pronged promise of "rich links and rich replication" as the benefits of
what he called "the deep idea of schematized information": I'm not an easy mark
for any vendor's promises, but what I saw at PDC strongly suggested that these
are phrases backed up by solid engineering and careful thought about developer
and end-user benefits.
I was further reminded of my 1984
AutoCAD memo when Microsoft VP Chris Capossela told the PDC audience that a
virtual folder in Microsoft Vista is merely an XML file. Before he could even
finish explaining the benefits, the developer audience drowned him out with
applause--they immediately "got it," realizing without further hand-holding that
their own applications could use sophisticated task knowledge or user-driven
logic to assemble and apply arbitrarily complex criteria for grouping and
presenting resources to the user. Also well-received was the notion of dragging
a document or other resource icon into various regions of the screen to "paint"
that system artifact, as Capossela put it, with corresponding metadata. The
meta-question of metadata--who's going to take the time to make those
associations?--was well-answered. As I said, not only technical functionality
but practical usability were jointly addressed by the PDC
presentations.
Offering PDC attendees more immediate
gratification were Microsoft's rollouts of its data access integration
technology, LINQ, for managed-code application writers and its Expression family of
illustration and Web-design tools--which radically streamlines the interaction
between those who determine the look and those who define the underlying
behavior of a site.
All of these technology introductions
that I've discussed here address the question of why developers should continue
to favor the Microsoft platform as the place where they work and as the target
for what they produce. By that definition, or for that matter by just about any
definition, one would have to call this PDC a great success
Tell me what you want to see from
Microsoft, and from other platform definers and tool builders, at peter_coffee@ziffdavis.com
