Top Ten Application Development Predictions For 2013

Program director at IDC Al Hilwa has laid down what he and his colleagues estimate to be the 10 most important predictions for software application development during 2013.

Hilwa reckons that safe bets can be placed upon an "enlightened coexistence" between web and native device application platforms. If this new dawn finally prevails then native deployed applications will remain dominant; but web platform (HTML5) technologies will make significant inroads.

They suggest that embedded platforms will also gain greater cohesion to the rest of the software universe, as they begin to align with major consumer device application platforms to leverage developer skill ecosystems.

IDC's Hilwa says that device frameworks for integrated multiscreen or second-screen applications will evolve to support new usage scenarios exploiting the convergence between personal tablet devices and shared big-screen TVs. He also asserts that cloud IDEs will mature for a broader range of software development scenarios.

"PaaS platforms will make inroads in the enterprise by offering private cloud options and stronger operational support capabilities; PaaS value extends beyond developers to engage IT operations in enterprises," argues Hilwa. "Multi-tenancy techniques in PaaS platforms will be the subject of experimentation as they are recognized as essential for providing efficiency and the required density to successful PaaS."

That makes six, so where does the analyst go for his final four predictions?

Developer clouds will evolve to offer a "broader and richer" set of programmer (and possibly other stakeholder) services such as team collaboration, social interaction, project and code repositories, device and browser testing, etc.

"Schedule-based software release cycle management will become the dominant style of release cycle management, gradually displacing feature-oriented release cycle management approaches," says Hilwa. "Mobile application platforms will show signs of diversification as Android exposes some weaknesses even as it dominates; new platforms will emerge and take hold if they have the right ingredients, focus, and execution."

The analyst rounds out by saying that heterogeneous parallel processing will become more common as general purpose (GP) applications take advantage of the parallel computation abilities offered by device GPUs.