Ask HN: What are the best technologies you've worked with this year?

COBOL ;)

Well, i still was in the university but i've had chance to play with a few ones:

LCDS, WebORB specifically and Flex 3 RoR Lift Web Framework

And in the Q4 of the year i used all my time to learn Android and a lot of cool API's:

Overlay-Manager to recognize gestures in Android AndEngine Geocoding and reverse geocoding Notifications by vibrating SMSManager

I really enjoyed developing Android stuff, and i'm keeping up with these for a while.

Apologies for blowing my own trumpet, but pound for pound, the neatest thing I've worked with this year is a C++ template I wrote. I like to have the tightest possible scoping of names, but a common pattern makes that difficult. If you've got a function that produces a good value or indicates that it couldn't do so one way to write it is:

  Type theVar;
  if (theFunction(theVar)
    { /*do something with theVar*/ }

theFunction returns true if it set theVar, false otherwise. The problem is that theVar's visibility extends beyond our interest in it. The ZQ template lets me write this:

  if (ZQ theQ = theFunction())
    { /*do something with theQ.Get()*/}

and all of a sudden I don't have to come up with anywhere near as many meaningful names as before.

To me it's neat because I've found many unanticipated uses for it e.g. wrapping the values in option-specifying structures where a default is cleanly indicated with a default-inited (or subsequently Clear()ed) ZQ, rather than having a separate 'use default' boolean, or 'set default' function.

http://zoolib.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/zoolib/trunk/zoolib...

LINQ

Seaside - a WebFramework based on smalltalk and continuations that make developing complex WebApps extremely easy. Seaside led me to learn:

Smalltalk - What a powerful language. This is what OOP should look like.

Object Oriented Databases - Gemstone and db4o. Not having to deal with the OO and Relational mismatch is a breath of fresh air.