Ajax and Agile Trends for Q3 and Q4 of 2007

Dietrich Kappe, Tuesday, May 29, 2007 @ 4:41 am

Over the last month or two I've noticed some definite trends in the sorts of questions that clients and prospective clients are asking my company (Pathfinder). Comparing notes with friends and competitors, it seems that the following technologies are really picking up steam towards the second half of 2007:

1. Ruby on Rails as a replacement for PHP. Big, complicated applications are still being written using Java and C# and their related frameworks. For those apps where speed to market is key, however, Ruby is starting to supplant PHP.
2. GWT for client-side Ajax apps. After an initial bit of nervousness ("Compiling to Javascript? Whah?"), the debugging capabilities and single language attraction of GWT seems to be winning out. People are still writing plenty of traditional web stack apps, with Prototype and its descendants leading the way, but look for more companies to make the jump to GWT.
3. Agile development. While not technically a technology, this trend has some real consequences for web and RIA development. The tools and frameworks that are agile influenced will give the teams and companies that adopt them a competitive advantage. Mind you, I've see "agile" and "iterative" thrown around in corporate circles as far back as 1999, with little positive impact. Now, I think, we have a new generation of managers who have some sense of what an agile development process can yield; they aren't adopting it to be buzz-word compliant -- they actually want the benefits that come from an agile approach.

The one trend that really seems to be accelerating is the PHP->Ruby migration. There has been hand wringing about this threat in the Drupal community since 2005. Time to saddle up, fellas. This time it's really coming.

agile ajax

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