WORKING... FINALLY!
Is it possible to build a web application that really fits people needs? Of course you can: to know what people need you must ask them.
This is how the idea of WorkOutLoud - a new product built with ruby on rails - was born.
WorkOutLoud will share its construction process on the web with the users.
Do you want to know what WorkOutLoud is all about?
Do you want to know what WorkOutLoud is all about?
Jun 1, 2009
Learn new stuff now: Ruby on Rails, Erlang and Objective-C
During the last few days I have made some considerations about what set of skills an Internet programmer must have nowadays and why they are so different from ten years ago. In 1999 the economy and the Internet revolution were fully showing their positive wave. New technologies, new programming languages were facing on the market, and every young startup addicted was betting his faith in the New Economy phenomenon. All you had to know was HTTP, HTML, one or two programming languages Internet-aware - like Java and PHP - and one database software - like MySql. In those years things were "pretty simple", because they were just born: MVC frameworks were in their infancy, computer power growth was following Moore's law and multi-core buzzword was 5 years away to be introduced on the market, smart phones were only phones and finally, Microsoft browser was actually winning its battle against the rest of the world. From then, a lot of things have changed rapidly, and some of those have made a huge impact on our daily life. Let's have a quick look at what I consider to be the three main facts affecting the big changes that are now part of our life.
posted by Massimo Sgrelli
First fact. In 2004 a new revolutionary Internet framework named Ruby on Rails was invented by David Heinemeier Hansson, and that definitely changed once and for all the way we develop web applications. I have been involved in many enterprise MVC framework designs for more then ten years, and Rails has been the very first technology that really simplified my work building a complex web application from scratch. Remember: there wouldn't be no Twitter without Rails.
Second fact. Exactly in the same year, in late 2004, semiconductor industry leaders announced that their new high performance microprocessors would henceforth rely on multiple processors or cores. The new industry buzzword multicore was born, and that began to change everything in how we would have designed high performance and highly scalable web applications in the future. Applications would have soon used concurrent processing strategies to address simple and complex issues. This processing power revolution gave a burst to cloud computing and people soon discovered that they needed new tools and new languages to face this challenge. Among the different programming languages useful for this goal, there was one invented by the Swedish telecom company Ericsson in the late 1980s, named Erlang, that perfectly fitted to the emerging concurrent processing needs. This programming language is going to drive the cloud computing revolution for the next few years, and smart companies like WideTag are driving the change. This young company will get huge attention in the next few years.
Third fact. About two years ago, Apple changed everything in the mobile market, launching the iPhone. A new revolutionary device, thought from the beginning to simplify user interaction with the mobile world and with the Internet in general. Apple set new standards in an instant and created a new unique global market devoted to mobile devices. Literally hundreds of thousands of applications have been uploaded to the Apple Store in a few months. For the second time since the Internet was launched, programmers felt that a huge opportunity was ahead of them. Then if you weren't a Mac programmer, in order to approach iPhone application development you needed to learn a completely new language called Objective-C. In the next few years knowing this language and all the other SDK stuff distributed by Apple will be really important, because you won't be able to plan the strategy of your application, without taking into account the iPhone platform.
