Software testing

Do you see it? Do you see where the applications development is going to?

The feature of applications development

Software application products are evolving. If you look 10 years ago the web development was just kicking off. Before that everything was desktop products and client/server technology. And now you can see a lot of the functionality that we are all using is placed on a web sites. We can see web games, web translation, web dictionary and many more. And all this does make sense. Why having only one computer that you can use to do whatever you need when you can use whatever computer you like. Web products can be used from home, the office or just a internet cafe computer. No installation of software products is needed and you have everything you need just in the Internet browser. But wait that was 10 years ago. Now what is the new? Where is all this going?

Now software products are going to a new significant change. Many of the big web sites start providing API functionality for interacting with their web site. The examples are a lot. Amazon provides web API for working with the huge database of books. Social networks like Facebook provides API for enriching their functionality and this functionality can be used for interacting with the social network huge users database. Google Maps provides API for interacting with their huge maps and satellite pictures database. Other huge web sites providing API for interaction with their database include YouTube, Flickr, Google Checkout and many many more.

Clearly the software development is evolving to a new stage where new software products will start using this rich functionalities available online. Why creating your own map, when you can use Google Maps? And why not combining this online Map with pictures form Flickr and videos from YouTube? Then maybe you can use the huge users network from Facabook and you have a new killer application.
The applications that are combining this rich services are called Mashups.