O Documentum Developer, Where Art Thou or rather Where Shall Thou Go?

I recently received an email from a Documentum developer asking about what technologies he should learn for the future, especially for job security.  Although I know Documentum technology well, I do not necessarily have a gauge on the job market.  Other bloggers like Virginia Backaitis tend to have a good pulse on the market as well as the development community.

That being said, I saw a recent blog posting about how Microsoft might be dumping .NET for HTML5 and Javascript.  This would be a game changer in the Documentum development community, which is basically comprise of two camps: java developers and .NET developers.  When Documentum version 5 came it, it was a big shift from Documentum’s proprietary API and docbasic to Java.  Documentum 5.3 provided a COM bridge that allowed Microsoft developers to call Documentum DFC (java classes).  With version 6.5, this COM bridge is no longer supported and Microsoft developers are forced to write web services to call Documentum DFS (web services).  Web services allow developers to integrate disparate systems running on different technologies (eg java vs .NET).  This was great advancement from a technical point of view, but practically it meant that a project might require both Java developer and Microsoft .NET developer.

If Microsoft is now going to switch development technologies away from .NET and to HTML+javascript, this means that learning proprietary .NET may no longer be necessary.  I bring this up because even EMC is planning to rewrite its Taskspace application using Spring and ExtJS.  I’m not sure if the SDK/customization model will be based on extended javascript, but I’m starting to see convergence on web development technology.

If I was a betting man, I would wager some money on learning ExtJS.  I wouldnt double down on it though.