UML Father Peeks Into Development Future.

Software will become pervasive during the next 30 years, and development of applications will evolve accordingly, according to one leading industry thinker.

IBM fellow Grady Booch yesterday predicted that IT systems will grow bigger as people come to rely on software in their day daily lives, through new forms such as wearable computers. This evolution in the computing landscape will mean hot- technology trends, such as XML and Service Oriented Architectures are left behind.

Looking ahead to 2031 during Rational's user conference in Dallas, Texas, Booch said: "Software will be larger than it is today."

Newer computing devices and runtimes means software will become increasingly distributed, and software development will evolve to tackle problems inherent in organizing development teams, designing systems and integrating distributed software.

New devices will produce new computer languages designed specifically for their systems, or domains.

"Java is not the last language," Booch told conference delegates during a keynote speech. "We will see continuation of languages... domain specific languages and frameworks will emerge built on UML semantics."

Modeling through UML, will become important as developers attempt to encapsulate system design using repeatable, scalable architectures. "We will see tremendous emergence of architectural patterns - assets - to codify the variety of patterns for understanding those distributed systems," Booch said.

Integrating these distributed systems will be tackled using new practices and architectures, which mean today's generation of work becomes dated and left behind.

"In the future, the hard things are weaving those systems together - SOA and XML are step on the way, but we will see other kinds of connection mechanism over time," Booch said. He noted 2031 would also see a growing legacy of XML, Java and C++ code living in computer systems.