Somehow I missed the release of second edition of Thoughtworks’ technology radar [PDF]. As they did in the inaugural edition they evaluated various techniques, tools, platforms and languages and put them in four buckets — hold, assess, trial and adopt.
I will jump to the biggest surprise (but something that’s consistent with what I’m hearing these days) — GWT is moved back from Assess to Hold status. I used to be a fan of the approach GWT took, mostly coming from my angst towards writing Javascript, and to develop client-side stuff using the language that I’m quite familiar with — Java. Although I haven’t done enterprise stuff with GWT yet, what I heard was it’s not as productive as I was earlier thinking about, and this technology radar points to some of the issues with the generation of Javascript in terms of productivity, troubleshoting, not being able to utilize powerful features of Javascript, and unit testing. I’m not giving up yet on GWT, but would certainly like to hear feedback from the folks who used it in production-grade applications with good success.
As far as languages are concerned — they are excited about two languages that I’m having great fun with — Scala and Clojure. I’m fairly convinced that the enterprises sooner than later would evaluate options of using these JVM-based languages than sticking with Java alone. Java as a language is not dead yet (in fact far from it and dead is a too harsh a word), but if the current trend continues in terms of these new breed of JVM languages (coupled with some good customer stories) that day may not be that far off. Other than that in the languages section — HTML 5 is gaining traction, which is expected.
In the tools category — Restfulie has got a mention. I think this is pretty significant in the world of REST-based development. Restfulie is an excellent tool to achieve Hypermedia constraint (HATEOAS) of REST, which helps significantly in loose coupling between clients and servers. They said it well — “It [success of Restufulie] is an emperical proof that the web and the hypermedia can be used to orchestrate complex business activities”.
Also in the tools category — Subversion moves back into the Adopt section. It has to be that way all along, in my opinion. I like distributed version control systems (Git and Mercurial) a lot but Subversion still has a place in the enterprise. I second their opinion that it’s a solid version control system suitable for most teams. New to enter the radar is Github, another success story, undoubtedly popularized Git along with their source code hosting and social networking abilities.
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