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

Scio Consulting Partners with Apprenda for Rapid SaaS Product Enablement

It is now official, Scio Consulting has partnered with Apprenda to offer SaaS enablement services using Apprenda’s cloud OS “SaaSGrid”. You can read more about the partnership on the company blog and you can read more about SaaSGrid here.
Among other things, that platform is built with SOA in mind and will allow us to not only build ASP.net Ajax applications but Silverlight and Flex RIA leveraging WCF services. And all that without having to worry about billing, multi-tenancy, subscription management and so on, as those are bundled with SaaSGrid.
So well, expect to see, reviews, tutorials and code samples soon…

Quartz.net Final Release

A few years ago, I had to create a scheduler to run .net jobs on a server. I went that route because using the OS scheduler had some limitations and also because no scheduler was available at that time.
I am pleased to see that Quartz.net, a port of the Java app Quartz has now reached v1.0 and can be used in production environment.

I hope to be testing that application soon, and I'll make sure to post a small review.
Congratulation to the Quartz.net team !

MVC with Silverlight - Frameworks review

For those that want to build large applications or are using TDD for all their projects, the MVC pattern is often used to make the presentation code more testable.
Almost every development platform have frameworks to assist developers when building MVC applications. With Flex, Cairngorm is the most popular I think but what about Silverlight?
If you don't like frameworks, you can just do MVC without using any but if you'd like to leverage a framework, I've found 3 frameworks:

• Caliburn
  Pros:
  
  
  • Support Commands, Actions
  • Includes a simple Dependency Injection Container
    
  • Easy to use, use of XAML
    
  • Small documentation available
  • Extensible, you can use another DI Container if you want.
    
  Cons:
  
  • Alpha quality and not yet feature complete.
  Comments:
  
  
  I think it's a good framework, that's the one I've selected for a small ShowCase in Silverlight and so far I'm happy with it even if it's an alpha build.
• MVC#
  Pros:
  
  
  • Support for tasks (aka use cases)
    
  • Same code for WinForm,Silverlight and ASP.net can be used to create 3 applications.
  Cons:
  
  
  • No direct support for XAML and declarative coding.
  • Not built for Silverlight only.
  Comments:
  
  
  Even if called MVC#, it uses the MVP (Model View Presenter) variation. The fact that it's built to support Winform, Silverlight and ASP.net make it harder to use and you need to write more code compared with the other frameworks. I think it has been built for LOB applications and not really for RIA.
• Silverlight.FX
  Pros:
  
  
  • Part of Silverlight.FX
  • Supports declarative coding
  • Lightweight
  Cons:
  
  
  • Limited features
  • Limited documentation
  Comments:
  
  
  For those that already have a reference to silverlight.FX in their application and don't need a fancy framework it will work well. You can even extend it if you want. Needless to say that it has been created by Nikhil and just like the Silverlight.FX code in general you can learn things by reading the source code even if you don't use the framework.

Playing Tetris while coding?

As many of us, I had to work on code that was created by someone else. In my case, it was even code wrote by multiple persons. My mission was to refactor and improve performance.
I found it interesting to compare that task to playing Tetris. First of all, reading thru the code was literally like a puzzle. The next part of the game, refactoring, reminded me a lot when you start a Tetris game with a screen already filled at 75% and you slowly start to “fix” the underlying structure to remove holes.
In the end, I had to stop playing Tetris on that one and completely rewrote the code. Not that I don’t like mind games but time is money and it was definitely faster to rewrite than try to “fix”.

Silverlight 2 to be released tomorrow

A few week after the Release Candidate, Microsoft announce the final release of Silverlight.
Tomorrow, Oct 14th the final release will be available for download on the official Silverlight website.

We are all eager to see that final release...

EC2 Will finally support Windows

Amazon announced that they will support Windows operating system later this fall. This is indeed great news for ASP.net developers. It will give them a chance to leverage the rock solid infrastructure of Amazon.
EC2 has been continuously improving, adding static ip addresses, Multiple Locations and more recently the long awaited Elastic Block Store (EBS). They've also expanded the number of instance types available, adding High CPU instances for computer intensive applications.
All those features made EC2 "ready for prime time" when using a *NIX OS and it is not surprising to see that Oracle recently announced its partnership with Amazon and allowed migration of existing licenses to EC2.

Amazon is now going to compete with other Cloud providers that were supporting Windows OS such as FlexiScale, Mosso or GoGrid to name a few. We have yet to see how Windows will perform on EC2 and especially how it will connect to EBS. Some will argue that Windows was already supported by using QEMU, however everyone that tested that configuration will agree with me in saying that it was not suitable for production use.