Customization is a great deal in every enterprise software deployment. Despite all efforts of vendors to invent out of the box (OOTB) enterprise software deployment, most of systems are requiring significant customization and coding. This is not a healthy situations, but with absence of better choices, manufacturing companies need to look for systems that can be flexible enough and supporting easy customization. In one of my previous blogs – PLM customization is Data Management titanic, I’ve been talking about challenges of customization as well as mentioned example of customers migrating between heavy customized PLM systems.
A typical PLM customization includes variety of tasks including changes in data models, tailoring of user interface and integration with other enterprise systems. To make your hands dirty and write some custom code is almost unavoidable task in this situation. If you long enough, you probably remember, VB and/or VB script were king of the road in all implementations and customization for many years. You practically had no choice to make any changes and customization without knowing this language.
I have to say that situation changed since the last decade. Intensive development of web and mobile application made VB/VBScript usage going down. JavaScript becomes a new king on the road. The following ReadWrite Web article caught my attention earlier today – Why Javascript will become the dominant programming language of the enterprise? Read the article and make your opinion. I found the following passage interesting:
There are strong odds in favor of JavaScript becoming the dominant language ofthe enterprise. This isn’t to say every other language will atrophy overnight (they won’t; too many legacy systems count on them) nor that JavaScript is free of issues (no language is). But the gigantic efficiencies to be gained by having a lingua franca for the enterprise, especially when that lingua is easily learned and already in wide adoption, makes the case for JavaScript very strong. Even Microsoft has warmed to the JavaScript movement, promoting it to first-class citizenship in Windows 8.
All of this is good news for the enterprise. A simple, open language, equally adapted to building both client and server-side apps? There’s no such thing as technology utopia, but JavaScript looks like the next best thing.
I often use Google Trend to capture dynamics of people interest. The following chart presents some dynamics between VBscripts and JS.
What is my conclusion? The landscape of software development is changing dramatically these days. Cloud, web and mobile development are main driving forces together with open source software. It will impact enterprise tools and introduce new requirements for integrating PLM products (and not only) in the enterprise and beyond. Important. Just my thoughts…
Best, Oleg
