Integration Applications: The Next Frontier in Programming

The programming world is undergoing a fundamental shift from monolithic applications to integration applications. Integration applications are created by coordinating and extending existing applications, protocols, frameworks, and devices rather than building from scratch. In this talk I'll describe why integration applications will dominate software development in the years ahead and what this means for the way we develop programs. In particular, some of the things that are taken for granted today, such as strong typing and inheritance, may not make sense in the future.

John Ousterhout is CEO of Scriptics Corporation, a company developing commercial applications around the Tcl scripting language while also advancing the open source Tcl/Tk core. Before Scriptics, John was a Professor of Computer Science at U.C. Berkeley and Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems.