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

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

#11

Post by samdk »

2010 was, for me, the year of JS-related technologies. (I'm actually rather disappointed I haven't had more time to check out Clojure and to use Haskell and Scala more--I was doing quite a lot of front-end web stuff.)

1. Socket.IO (http://socket.io/)

It lets you use websockets and automatically fall back to flash sockets, long polling, or several other real-time communication methods if websockets aren't supported by the client. There's a JS client and node-compatible server, as well as in-progress server implementations in a few other languages. Node is nice by itself, but it's with things like Socket.IO that it really shines.

2. Coffeescript (http://jashkenas.github.com/coffee-script/)

Coffeescript is a nice-looking and nice-to-type syntax on top of JavaScript. It's made JS development a lot friendlier, and I now miss things about it every time I'm programming in Python and Ruby. I now use it whenever I'm doing any significant amount of coding in JS.

3. Node.js (http://nodejs.org/)

Node should, by this point, need no introduction. Server-side JS. Plays very nicely with websockets thanks to Socket.IO, making it very easy to write the server-side part of real-time webapps. I've also found it very useful when trying to quickly prototype simple non-webapp things that have to communicate over a network.

I haven't had a chance to check out Backbone.js (http://documentcloud.github.com/backbone/) yet beyond a very quick look, but I expect to use it (or something like it) next time I'm developing something that uses a significant amount of client-side JS.

I'm also very excited by the continued development on (and Yehuda Katz's participation in) SproutCore (http://www.sproutcore.com/).

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

#12

Post by zefhous »

All thanks to jashkenas: CoffeeScript, Underscore.js, and Backbone.js.

Using those tools has helped me to really enjoy writing JavaScript and to start doing it in a much more organized manner. They have been a huge catalyst for my growth as a JavaScript developer.

Also, using MongoDB has been awesome!

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

#14

Post by DanHulton »

1) MongoDB - I started off using it in place of a few tables that had some varied column requirements, and I'm now in the middle of converting my entire DB to it. So awesome.

2) Kohana - I love working with this framework. I never really worry about the ugly warts in PHP, because honestly? I'm not programming in PHP any more. I'm programming in Kohana, and I only occasionally fall back to PHP for "low-level" stuff.

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

#16

Post by RoyceFullerton »

In 2010 I fell in love with:

1. Groovy - a programming language, it rocks because it less verbose and more powerful than Java and I can fall back onto standard Java syntax when I don't care to figure out how to do something in the 'Groovy' way. (http://groovy.codehaus.org)

2. Gaelyk - a groovy framework that runs on Google App Engine. Google App Engine is great for launching apps. It's free until it gets traction. (http://gaelyk.appspot.com)

3. Objectify - The simplest convenient interface to the Google App Engine datastore. Takes a lot of the pain out of using Bigtable. (http://code.google.com/p/objectify-appengine)

These all pack a mean punch and let me work on my night/weekend projects quite productively after overcoming a small learning curve.

I built http://icusawme.com and http://chatroulettespy.com with all three.

I'm looking forward to diving deeper into Appcelerator Titanium Mobile in early 2011.

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

#20

Post by sophacles »

sarkozy wrote: post #17
patio11 wrote: post #15

Twilio. Ringing phones is pure magic, and provides so many disruptive opportunities it is staggering.

Sure. You can disrupt someone on the toilet, at the dinner table, in bed, etc, etc. Very disruptive indeed.

There was a time in my life, where every single time my girlfriend and I were about to enjoy some adult time, my employees would call. Without fail. There has to be some sort of twillo app idea in there somewhere.
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