Thoughtworks published another version of their technology radar. I think it gives good insight on the state of the computer industry. I recommend reading it but to tease you, I’ll give you a few highlights:
- Ruby (and JRuby) are ready for adoption.
- You might consider to start fading out Java (as a language) to use some of the alternatives on the JVM.
- Languages on the JVM (Scala, Clojure, Groovy and of course JRuby) are growing and well-positioned to be more widely used in the future
- Although they love Distributed Version Control tools (Git, Mercurial), they require more knowledge to get the most out of them so using good-old Subversion might be better for your team. Although I would never want to go back to Subversion now that I switched to Git, I have to agree: before adopting Git, make sure you have someone who can handle it in your team.
- Think twice about using GWT. Although it promises writing Java-like code that will then generate unit-testable Javascript widgets, in practice it doesn’t work very well. I’ve practiced a lot lately and I tend to approve their point.
- Amazon’s EC2 is the most mature solution if you want to deploy on the Cloud.
Read their analysis to know more. It talks about NoSql, Restfulie, C#, Internet Explorer, HTML5… There’s something for everyone and you might learn about a few technologies that will be big in the near future.