Gioorgi IT Observer

Every Year, Giovanni consider some “trends”  based on his consultant experience.
This trends have been gathered in the last six months, and are printed  at regular basis.
This thoughts  are note merely “preference”, but are strong opinions based on IT firms products, cleared by buzz-words and soap-opera-like scoop (like “Wired”  bad ideas are :).

CMS Market is still facing PHP simplicity versus huge software house products.

Druapl & WordPress are good.
Drupal is an ace if you are very dynamic needs. For instance, multi-language sites, forums, polls and so on are a snap to install. But if usability is a concern, choose wordpress. joomla/Mambo are not so good in my own opinion, but I’d like to her a comment from you.

Why Portals are dead for the next six months.

Even LifeRay Portal, which is very good, it is not cost-effective. A portal server absorb huge resources (for configuration, developing, and so on) and it is a good solution only for very big corporate reality.
Worst, simple Java skills are not enough, so Consultant firms ask for a very huge pricing.
If you are planning a new big site, be carefully about portal servers.

Stable Language Trends

Java is always the best option for Enterpise Web Developement.
Anyway  there is a new Rich Intenet Application deja-vù, stongly piloted by Adobe Flex.
JavaFX tries to javize this field, but it comes at last.
Ajax remains the buzzword of the 2008, so RIAs is an hard guess in my own opinion: RIA had always a difficult path to adoption (flash is mostly used for graphics, and java applets are quite dead).

Javascript and Ajax instead are already usable on the IPhone, so which will win?….

Edge Language Trends

RubyOnRails wars against php is doing some good work. According to Google trends, php usage is a bit reduced in favor of ruby, but php remains the king for the segment. It is unclear if ruby is he major competitor, but it is a sign.

Ruby seems slashing Perl, at least in the blogsphere, but this is not an accurate metric.

I will discourage you from learning Perl because of its cryptic syntax, and because Perl6 seems vaporware.
If you feel confident with Ruby, focus on RubyOnRails and you will be fine.
Finally, if you plan to work with Google software, python is a must. Python look fine also for simple scripting, and it is a very good alternative to Perl.

Version control system trends

In the last year, the war is between mercurial, svn and git. The Svn reduced speed for large project, and its the central-repository philosphy has given the chance to a bunch of competitors.

Mercurial was chosen by Sun to hold the code base of Java. Mercurial is blazing fast, and it is well coded. Because it is written in Python, it is also easy to mantain.

Git was build by Linus Torwalds for developing Linux, so its quality is guaranteed.

My suggestion it to start looking for these two, without moving from svn because of  software like track.

Spam Wars: about 233 Emails per day. Personal considerations
At the start of august my spam test box has reached over 7000 spam emails per month, as opposite to the 4000 of six months ago.  Anyay, very little of this email goes in my inbox.

At the end of september my spam box reached 9000, and now it bumped down to 5000.