Can You Hear Me Now?

Video will also raise its profile in the enterprise world, the toolmakers believe. Jean-François Abramatic, chief product officer of ILOG, expects video and audio to mature in the next two or three years. "We'll see rich Internet applications on computers, cell phones and televisions," he says. Of course, whether this vision comes to pass depends on the network carriers and device makers as well: Along with bandwidth and storage, we need a mobile infrastructure and Internet that can stand up to that much video streaming.

Several experts brought up the Apple iPhone, usually followed by an expression like "...is just the beginning." That's because Apple is inspiring these developers to think of mobile application design in a new way. Phone input and output is essentially numbers, video and audio, which are far different from the documents that a Web browser handles. Yes, a phone can show webpages today—but its native interface is numbers on that teeny keyboard.

With the application design concerns about those two different worlds, Alex Russell, project lead for the Dojo Toolkit, says, "We'll get better access to the phone hardware, and that will change app design. Mobile app design will change."

Users will also demand more application personalization, points out Sun's Brewin. They won't want just data feeds or schemes; they'll want to compose applications to extend the data model that the application is aware of, create fields for data capture, and have "composability."

Certainly, all that data sharing will have its price. Web 2.0 enables users to exchange information—but how much? With whom? Companies jumping on the Web 2.0 bandwagon will eventually run into problems with security and privacy, Brewin says.

No amount of cinematics or personalization will help the applications take off, though, if the process of building those applications is too difficult for developers to bear. That's our next topic: Making Development Less Difficult, or Interceding with the Browser Gods.