2001: How Did We Do?

	Web Services and Application Development

by Andre Leclerc

January 14, 2002

Well, it sure is nice to close the books on 2001, a year none of us can ever forget. To quote John Lennon: "Another year over and what have we learned?" I personally learned much from the past year. This is the year when the Java "Jello" solidified and we put an end to the Java wars. It also is the year when the "dot.bomb" era came to an abrupt end. It is also the year when CORBA was recognized as being on its deathbed because of the Sun and Microsoft initiatives. It is the year when Microsoft solidified its grip on the desktop and rolled out a strategy to become ubiquitous on the Internet. This year the OMG introduced MDA, Model Driven Architecture, which hopefully will lead us to better modeling and architecting of software products. It is also the year of consolidation, mergers and acquisitions for numerous companies that now understand the nature of the game that will be played to dominate the Internet over the next few years. Online Internet sales for the holiday season were the highest ever and showed many patterns of permanence, i.e., buying on the Internet is now a permanent fixture in our lives.

Let me make personal observations on a few of those events.

A friend of mine was reading an article that described how so many companies were attracted to a new technology and got the attention of most investors to create start-up companies.