When the pages of history are rolled on top of one another, and the leaf marked “2007” is long buried beneath the folds, what ink will soak through to the pages beyond? The year that was may be remembered for the assassination of Benazir Bhutto and the final gasps of the housing bubble. Hardly a year of nobility. However, for software developers, progress carried the day. Mobile developers finally understood the potential they held in their hands, thanks to the iPhone and Google’s Android specification. BEA and Oracle agreed to make sweet love down by the San Francisco Bay. And GPL began to show its teeth, as the boys behind BusyBox defended their property rights.

As for project managers, they pushed forward, with forethought and purpose, into open-source projects, agile practices and distributed application life-cycle management. It was all about collaboration: social modeling, adaptive service-level agreements, dynamic service creation and everything—yes, everything—on the Web.

It was a year that went particularly meta. Meta tags were everywhere—on source code, appended to documents, pasted onto media assets and code snippets—all of them slowly funneling into the giant repositories from which enterprises increasingly live. Further meta came at the hands of virtualized test centers and virtualized deployment environments dynamically allocating resources.