I Sense the Rumblings of an Impending Paradigm Shift

by Jeff Tash, ITscout

WARNING: Shifting Paradigms up ahead

How many paradigm shifts have you survived? Personally, I find them quite exhilarating. During my thirty year career I have seen my fair share of shifting paradigms. Professionally, I have thrived every time I shifted paradigms. It was never easy, often painful, but always worth it.

Paradigms shape how humans think. Paradigms literally control how people perceive their own world. They’re responsible for shaping our attitudes, opinions and beliefs. Paradigms are incredibly powerful psychologically.

Copernicus was an ancient paradigm shifter. Originally, as explained by religion, it was thought that the earth was at the center of the universe. Of course, after proving how the earth revolves around the sun, Copernicus died as a result of his discovery. Columbus was another paradigm shifter. So too were Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein. You can obviously think of many other famous names like Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, Orville and Wilbur Wright, Henry Ford -- all very big paradigm shifters.

While our grandparents and parents experienced many monumental paradigm shifts during the 20th century, especially in the areas of transportation, energy, and communications, today’s current information age generation is going through some pretty miraculous paradigm shifts of its own. Think how the invention of the Xerox copier suddenly made everyone into a printer. Similarly, today’s desktop publishing allows almost anyone to become a publisher. Also look at what can be done with current products that let people edit digital photographs, video, or audio. The convergence of cell phones, digital cameras, camcorders, PDAs, iPods, GPS, and who knows what else, promises that some pretty significant paradigm shifting might be coming pretty soon.

We in the computer industry have had our own superstar paradigm shifters. People like IBM’s Dr. Ted Codd who invented relational database technology, and the Xerox PARC team that revolutionized software development with the introduction of object-oriented programming. In the early years of computing, hardware and operating systems led the paradigm shifting parade with people like Seymour Cray at Control Data and Gene Amdahl at IBM. In addition, every modern operating system can trace its roots back to two paradigm shifting projects at MIT and Harvard in the late-1960s, Multics and Project MAC.

Over the years I have learned when to anticipate upcoming major paradigm shifts. Shift always seems to happen (software developers sometimes leave off the letter ‘f’) whenever there’s a significant change to the user interface.

In the beginning there were batch systems. Applications were designed around punch cards and magnetic tapes. Usually, batch applications processed two files: an old master file and the daily transactionlog file. The logic of the application performed a sort-merge operation resulting in a new master file.

Next came terminals. In IBM’s case, the terminals were 3270s which essentially treated the entire display as a 24x80 memory buffer. Each of the 1920 character positions contained a character to be displayed or a control character to be stored. The latter allowed for support of forms with data entry fields that could be filled-in by the operator. Once data entry on a form was completed, the terminal operator hit the SEND key on the keyboard and the data inside the terminal was sent to a backend IBM mainframe running an application called CICS that was responsible for all online transactions.

The minicomputer companies introduced character-based terminals which worked quite differently than IBM’s 3270s. The quintessential example of these was DEC’s VT100. Every time the user depressed a character on the keyboard, that information was sent to the host computer causing an interrupt. From there, the system would do two things. First, it would immediately turnaround and resend the character back to the sending terminal with instructions for it to be echoed onto the display screen at the proper location. Second, it would pass the input character along to a corresponding host application. Unlike with CICS, the minicomputer timesharing operating systems treated each user’s terminal as a virtual console connected to a virtual machine.

The next wave along the evolutionary user interface path was a tsunami. I’m referring, of course, to the introduction of the personal computer, especially Microsoft’s version of MS-DOS. The original PCs evolved into current-day GUI-based WIMP systems as epitomized by Microsoft Windows. (GUI stands for Graphical User Interface. WIMP is an acronym for Windows, Icons, Menus, and Pointing device, or Windows, Icons, Mouse, and Pull-down menus). The magic of having a personal computer was how it allowed for support of a type of video I/O called memory mapping. Instead of sending data down a wire from a host to a terminal, the way PCs displayed data was by having the CPU store directly into an area of memory that was mapped by the hardware to a specific physical location on the video screen.

Finally, we come to the current environment where the web browser has emerged as the all-purpose platform for user interfaces. Its greatest value is its ubiquity. But innovation has stagnated. Once Microsoft destroyed Netscape and monopolistically seized control over the web browser market with its Internet Explorer (IE) product, new development virtually ceased. Firefox, the only real potential competitor, has as its primary legitimate marketing weapon that it’s not IE. All the evil-doer hackers in the world concentrate their attacks on IE. Therefore, Firefox, at least for the moment, seems to be more secure.

One of the key drivers that has kept web browsers front and center are portals. Portals are a type of middleware associated with application integration. Enterprise Information Portals (EIPs) allow users to view a multitude of separate, independent applications through a single Web browser-based user interface. Each running application can be executing on either side of a corporate firewall. One of the most important benefits of portals is being able to avoid the complexity and cost of working with Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) tools. With portals, the user connects to each back-end system through a common point of integration and all interaction is performed through a standard web browser user interface.

Interestingly, portals share many of the same characteristics exhibited by CICS in an earlier era. CICS allowed an inherently batch operating system, OS/360/370, to run online transactions. A large part of the problem with today’s portals is that the web itself was never intended to be used as a platform for interactive applications. Its design center, based around HTTP and HTML, was focused on transmitting documents. As such, in order for applications to simulate conversational exchanges they must continually load and reload web pages.

So, you ask, what is the next new user interface paradigm? It’s called rich client. Think of it, sort of, as back to the future. A rich client runs software on the client, just like an old-fashioned client/server application. One of the main differences, though, is that with rich clients, the back-ends are now essentially all running only industry standard Internet protocols. SOA (Service Oriented Architecture), implemented using web services, is what makes it possible for rich clients to be able to emerge at this time.

Back during the days of client/server computing, lots of applications were partitioned across multiple platforms using an Object Request Broker (ORB) like Microsoft’s DCOM or OMG’s CORBA as middleware. Other applications were partitioned at the database layer, sending SQL to a back-end RDBMS or an ODBC engine. The biggest problem with any of these older approaches was always security. Data packets just couldn’t get past the firewalls. SOA-based web services bypass the whole firewall problem entirely by passing freely through port 80 just like plain old HTML web pages. The underlying breakthrough that makes SOA and rich clients possible is XML

Why are people going to rush to embrace rich clients? The answer is a user seductive interface. To the user the interface is the system. Have you ever held an Apple iPod in your hand? What makes the very word iPod nowadays share the same kind of brand power as, say, Kleenex or Band-Aid? It’s not because Apple’s player makes music sound better than other MP3 players. It’s because the iPod’s naturally intuitive user interface is awesome. Historically, the key to a killer interface has always been a feature known as direct manipulation. It’s all about control. With SOA, suddenly it’s possible to dream about all kinds of new and exciting ways for people to use computers for communicating, exploring, interacting, and being entertained.

In addition to the appearance of some really cool-looking sexy new rich client-enabled controls, I’m also looking forward to rich client-enabled interfaces cropping up embedded within other products. Imagine being able, from within Excel, to easily access a service that automatically returns information directly into a spreadsheet, seamlessly and transparently.

I sense the rumblings of an impending paradigm shift. I urge you to maintain a vigil, watching out for rich clients. That’s the next hot new technology. It’s going to grip the imagination of business strategists and create market frenzy. It’s going to be just like at the start of the web once again. Brace yourself. I suggest you keep two thin dimes in your pocket. This isn’t about inflation. I’m not saying that it now costs twenty cents to put your two cents in. Rather, you might want to use those pair o’ dimes as a constant reminder of the awesome power of paradigms.