Friday, January 16, 2009

2009 RIA Technology Trends

Since we are starting a new year, many of you like me, may start thinking about what technology will empower 2009's Rich Internet Applications. Various bloggers posted charts and there are even sites dedicated to doing those stats. I am not going to put charts here along with the usual disclaimer explaining that indicators are and will remain indicators. Instead I’ll provide links and info on how to have your own opinion and discuss it here.

Let’s first go thru a list of indicators that can be used.

  • Book sales: this indicator is used by O’Reilly and you can see their stats on O'REILLY Radar.
  • Number of pages containing the word: you can easily get access to that information from Google trends or using Yahoo API and the TIOBE Index will provide a consolidated from all search engines.
  • Number of job posting: A couple of sites can give you access to that information: Indeed or SimplyHired
  • Number of Hits on specific sites: you can see what LangPop.com did to give you ideas.

Once you have indicators you can start using them with some keywords. For example you can try to compare Flex, Silverlight and Ajax. Or compare Ruby on Rails, Python Django and ASP.net MVC. The fact is that RIA applications have a client side and server side technology so you should really end up with 2 lists even though not all combinations are possible.

Whether an indicator is valuable or not is up to you but I guess that if you’re looking for a job, the job postings indicator will probably tell you on which technology to concentrate on even though it might not be the most popular.

Here are my forecast for 2009:

  • I think that for the UI XHTML/CSS/JavaScript will remains on top, followed by Flex and Silverlight (Omitting JavaFX, XUL, Curl as they are small).
  • For the backend Java and .net seems to come first, with Java going down and .net going up. Second place would be PHP and third place Python Django, Ruby on Rails, ColdFusion with Ruby and Python rising.
Feel free to post your own as undoubtedly my forecasts are biased :D