Emerging technologies for network software development: past, present and future

The article addresses the emerging technologies for developing network software. As networking technology has made great progress in its speed and connectivity in the past twenty years (1976-96), network software has also evolved and many technologies have been tried and applied to network software development. Formal methods provide model verification, and some sorts of automatic program generation and artificial intelligence open the new arena of intelligent network software. Object oriented technology is coming into practice and enhances the maintainability and reuse of software. Recently, emerging technologies such as distributed objects, mobile agents, Java and network programming will redefine the concept of network software and its development methodology. Commemorating the twentieth COMPSAC, the article summarizes these twenty years' experience and discusses future directions of network software development.