If you grasped the direct reference to fighter-pilot movies or "Strike Commander" classic PC game, you’ve probably instinctively tried to check your radar. Good guess, but this time it’s not about "Top Gun" but "ThoughtWorks Technology Radar" that has been updated few days ago.
What is TW Technology Radar? If you come from corporate environment, you may have heard about Gartner’s HypeCycle graphs - each year Gartner’s analysts assess current state of several IT market aspects - technologies, methodologies, platforms, vendors potential etc. For each of those they estimate its maturity - whether it’s mature enough for adoption (or stil in hype phase…) and how does market respond to it currently.
TWs does the similar thing with their Technology Radar - but:
- they don’t ask for money of those, who want to see it
- they go far more low-level, to particular libraries / frameworks, so it’s far more interesting for architects / developers
Here’s the link: http://www.thoughtworks.com/radar
And here are my comments - I’ve divided them into 4 sections, in accordance with division introduced in radar itself:
Techniques
Automated deployment tops the stack and it’s not really surprising. Logs as data goes up and it’s a clear proof of Map-Reduce gaining more and more adoption. The only thing that really surprised me is a singleton in “hold” category - browser-based testing. I think it may be due to rise of tools like PhantomJS.
Platforms
I’m glad to see Redis'es strong presence in “adopt” category - especially as Microsoft port to Windows platform has been recently officially published (and is available on NuGet). Market's interest in Node.js is clearly expressed in its position as well. I’m quite surprised with relatively low Azure's place - recently I've heard many praises (even from people / organization who don't use ,NET stack at all). PhoneGap's “assess” status is a big question mark.
Tools
In short words: strong NuGet's position ain't surprising at all, but PSake's is. IMHO it's a clear testimonial of “infrastructure as code” gaining popularity worldwide. TFS going down - it’s high time.
Languages & frameworks (finally …)
Plenty of meat here! And I agree with majority of statements. Scala and Clojure are definitely programming languages of tomorrow, Jasmine paired with Node.js (as opposite to browser-based testing) seems like a great way for UI test automation, JavaScript-based specialized MV* app building frameworks / libraries are definitely worth looking at (Angular, Angular, ANGULAR!), but this approach was NOT fully validated by the market YET. Stored procedures are “passe” for such a long time already, that I’m surpised they’ve even been considered in the list …
Conclusions:
- Learn JavaScript, …
- Learn even more JavaScript, …
- … and Scala :)