Phil Wainewright: “The price of software is inexorably grinding towards zero. Software is becoming infrastructure, and that infrastructure is progressively becoming commoditized. A key part of this evolution is the abstraction of application logic out of software and into standards-compliant XML documents. Once all of the identities and rules that define a set of processes (ie an application) can be expressed as XML, then creating or modifying an application becomes an editing task rather than a programming job. That editing task will still have to paid for, and it might well accumulate intellectual property of some value — but the money will not go to software developers. Some software experts will earn a living from operating the infrastructure that processes the XML documents. But the infrastructure itself will be built with open-source software.”
I mostly agree with what Phil Wainewright writes in this post, particularly about the commoditization of infrastructure via Open Source software.
I suggest you read the rest of the article. However, I has some reservations about expressing all application logic as XML documents. Application logic is inevitably bound to be more complex — save for trivial applications — than what can be comfortably expressed as declarative XML. XML is not a scripting language and trying to turn it into one has invariably led to less than desirable effects.
Also, I don’t understand the distinction between “editing” and “programming”. If you are editing files (XML or otherwise) that describe some form of application logic, what are you doing if not programming?
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