Evolutionary Web Browsers And JavaScript Apications To IPhone with Android

Web browsers continue to evolve as they strive to keep pace with new specifications in HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Alas, many enterprises have yet to embrace the end of life for IE6 and move to a newer and more standards compliant option. Of the browsers available today, Firefox and Opera provide support for the widest range of platforms. The Google browser, Chrome, brings new innovation to the browser space by splitting browser tabs into separate processes while providing a new implementation of JavaScript. These changes appear to give Chrome a significant performance boost over other browsers and have influenced the creation of a netbook OS called Chrome OS. While enterprises may look to move off IE6 and onto Microsoft’s IE8, we remain concerned about IE8’s current level of compliance to web standards.


The semantic web and its underlying technologies, including RDF & SPARQL, have been around for 8
years or more. Broader uptake of the Cloud and non-relational databases such Neo4j have helped
move the semantic web into the reach of enterprise developers. Outside of the semantic web, nonrelational
databases are being adopted as alternatives to relational databases in a number of situations. Leveraging these technologies will require new approaches to architecture and development that suggest widespread adoption will only occur over a number of years.

The iPhone and android operating systems have rapidly become key players in the mobile platform marketplace. Apple’s app store and Google’s open source operating system have helped both companies leapfrog the competition in capturing developer mindshare. While the radar has called out the possibility of the
Java language nearing its end of life, the JVM is demonstrating its resilience as a general-purpose virtual machine for other languages such as Ruby, Groovy, Scala and Clojure.

Our position on Rich Internet Applications has changed over the past year. Experience has shown that platforms such as Silverlight, Flex and JavaFX may be useful for rich visualizations of data but provide few benefits over simpler web applications. Given that these toolsets have limited support for automated testing, it would suggest that a more traditional web application stack provides greater value for enterprise development. We recommend only using RIA platforms for rich visualizations incorporated into web applications, not as comprehensive development targets.

At the start of October, ThoughtWorks became a customer of Google Apps. Although we have heard
a wide range of opinions about the user experience offered by Google Mail, Calendar and Documents,
the general consensus is that our largely consultant workforce is happy with the move. The next step that
we as a company are looking to embrace is Google as a corporate platform beyond the standard
Google Apps; in particular we are evaluating the use of Google App Engine for a number of internal systems initiatives.

Google App Engine, Amazon EC2 and Salesforce.com all claim to be Cloud providers, yet each of their offerings differ. The Cloud fits into a broad categorization of service offerings split out into Infrastructure as
a Service (e.g. Amazon EC2 and Rackspace), Platform as a Service (e.g. App Engine) and Software as a Service (e.g. Salesforce.com). In some cases, providers may span multiple service categories, further diluting the Cloud as a label. Regardless, the value of infrastructure, platform and software in the cloud is difficult to question and although many offerings have hit bumps in the road, they certainly have earned their position on
the radar.