Alfresco Fresh Talk…

Web Technologies and Trends to Keep an Eye on in 2008

February 7th, 2008

I’ve been giving some thought to different technologies and trends that I feel will experience tremendous growth or otherwise positively impact web development during the course of 2008. Naturally, these opinions are my own and not those of my employer. Now, in no particular order, I list some of my top picks:

• Dynamic/Scripting Languages for Java: Particularly Groovy, JRuby, and Rhino (JavaScript). Developers are looking to become more efficient/agile and traditional compiled languages (even Java) tend to get in the way of productivity.
• Server-side JavaScript/ECMAscript: Alfresco uses it for Web Scripts, so does Aptana Jaxer and WSO2’s Mashup Server… A developer at Google even wrote Rhino (JavaScript) on Rails! Expect more of this in ‘08.
• Cloud Computing: Especially from Amazon (EC2, S3, SimpleDB, SQS, and FPS). Though there are some competitors out there with comparable services, Amazon is just about the only place where you can get virtually everything under one roof. Besides, who doesn’t have an Amazon account already? The only thing that would make Amazon AWS better would be a powerful “Control Center” from where I can manage all aspects of my grid environment… Perhaps Enomalism will help?
• Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) and Development Tools: In particular Aptana, Adobe AIR, Adobe Flex & Flex Builder, OpenLaszlo, Google Web Toolkit (GWT) and JavaScript libraries (extJS, jquery, etc.) among many other related tools.

Here are some things that I’m excited about but will probably need a little more time to mature. Perhaps by the end of the year or early 2009 we should see some interesting developments from:

• BungeeConnect: While SalesForce dominates the Software as a Service market, Bungee Labs may be able to offer synergistic and perhaps competitive services along with a slick web-based IDE. I’ve been toying with it a bit, and feel it needs a little more baking time in the oven. Keep a lookout for Kapow Technologies and other vendors in this field.
• Grails: Groovy’s answer to Ruby on Rails. It recently became a 1.0 product (which means “Beta” in my book). Now that there’s a startup behind it (read: venture capital), I hope to see rapid improvements and a stronger community form behind it. But it’s probably not going to really make it big until late ‘08 at the earliest. I am a bit concerned about G2One’s business model… Too early to tell.

Finally, here are some things I really dislike:

• JSR 170 (JCR): Many content management vendors (including us) have a JCR-compliant content repository but the spec has lots of failings that its successor will be addressing at least in part. Regardless, it’s biggest Achiles heel is that it’s strictly Java-only… This is a non-starter in my book. In this world of web services (REST, SOAP, AJAX, etc.), we need something that’s cross platform and easy to invoke. JCR ain’t it.
• JavaServer Faces: Ugh! Kill me now! I can’t think of any Java web framework that gets more in the developers’ way than JSF. Many will disagree, but IMHO, it’s totally unproductive.
• Facebook: I got Facebook-fatigue within 3 minutes of signing up… Now, if we could take some of the core concepts and bring them behind the corporate firewall… Project Networks… Oh, wait! I’m talking about Alfresco 3.0!

So… That’s what I think…

What are your thoughts?

Entry Filed under: Miscellaneous