Thoughtworks Tech Radar Oct 2012

http://www.thoughtworks.com/articles/technology-radar-october-2012

Techniques

• micro-services (Dropwizard, declarative provisioning)
• Edge Side Includes (ESI) for page composition (Varnish)
• Configuration in DNS 
• aggregates as documents 
• automated deployment pipeline (first class in build tool)
• work-in-progress limits 
• declarative provisioning. (Pallet)
• Mobile first 
• responsive web design 
• advanced analytics 
• logs as data 
• guerrilla user testing, remote usability testing
• Semantic monitoring (continuously test app in prod through test-execution/real-time monitoring)
• In-process acceptance testing 
• Recommend against exhaustive browser based testing.  

Tools

• Rake for Java and .Net projects.
• Gradle 
• GemJars 
• immutable servers (‘phoenix servers’), Chef/Puppet, software designed to withstand failure
• Jasmine paired with Node.js
• Zipkin (monitoring)
• Zucchini (Cucumber for iOS)
• JetBrains AppCode IDE (iOS and OS X)
• Light Table
• Apache Pig (Hadoop MR pipelines)
• Crazy Egg (heat maps), Gaze, Silverback
• Graphite  
• Riemann (aggregates and relays events in real time)
• Highcharts
• D3
• Dependency Structure Matrices (DSM)
• embedded servlet containers (SimpleWeb and Webbit)
• Locust (in-line automated performance testing) Python, better than JMeter or Grinder
• SaaS performance testing tools (Blitz.io and Tealeaf) 

  Platforms

• Hybrid clouds
• open source IaaS (OpenStack or CloudStack)
• Google BigQuery
• Microsoft’s Azure 
• Continuous integration in the cloud (no local software and minimal configuration)
• mobile payment systems (M-Pesa, Square)
• MongoDB
• Neo4j
• Riak
• Datomic
• Couchbase
• Vert.x 
• Calatrava (cross-platform mobile application development
• Meteor.js (client- and server-side JavaScript application framework backed by MongoDB)
• Demoted: Windows Phone
• Demoted: Singleton infrastructure  

  Languages & Frameworks

• JavaScript as a platform
• Require.js.
• Twitter Bootstrap
• Scratch, Alice, and Kodu (programming languages for kids)
• Lua
• Sinatra, Flask, Scalatra and Compojure
• Dropwizard (embedded HTTP server, RESTful endpoints, built-in metrics and health-checks, and straightforward deployments)
• Gremlin (imperative graph traversal language)
• Jekyll (“microization” of web publishing framework)
• RubyMotion (Ruby compiler and toolchain for developing iOS applications)
• HTML5 for offline application
• AngularJS and Knockout 
• Demoted: Backbone.js
• Demoted: component-based web frameworks (don't attempt to make web development into something that it fundamentally is not