A sea change is occurring in how applications are being built. Facebook and social platforms are major drivers of application development, and these applications are not necessarily done using Enterprise JavaBeans, IDEs, and version control. Instead, developers can write PHP scripts in notepad, said Fast.

Professional developers, meanwhile, will build foundational platforms. "We'll be building the platforms that enable anyone to build applications on top, to increase the richness of the Web," said Fast. Engineers will work lower in the software development stacks.

In the new application development realm, situational, disposable applications are becoming prominent. The concept of Development 2.0 is emerging with higher levels of developer abstraction, such as Yahoo Pipes.

"As we see abstractions go up, we see more people able to participate, able to create applications," Fast said. Tools are being developed for casual developers.

Attendees at Fast's presentation tended to agree with Fast's premise that the role of the professional developer is shifting.

"It's a very interesting concept. I don't think it's coming as fast as he is pointing out, but it's probably coming," said Ceco Ivanov, software engineer at Genova Diagnostics, a medical lab. The shift will happen in the next 10 to 15 years, not two years, Ivanov said. But the trend is good in that it enables people to collaborate, he said.

Agility requires empowerment of end-users, another developer said.

"Essentially, writing code is very complex, and even in the corporate world, you need to empower the end-users to piece together their own applications because you need to be agile," said Tim Martel, a developer at Pegasystems, which develops Web-based business process management systems.

Fast also said the metric for applications is becoming how many people use an application as opposed to how time it took to build. The Zombies game application in Facebook, for example, was used by 250,000 people every day last October, said Fast. This application was written by one programmer who did it for fun, Fast said.

The Slide widget application, meanwhile, has 5 million users. "Nothing I built ever had 5 million users," Fast said.