Emerging Technologies

March 18, 2015 by jason

It certainly has been a while since I've updated anything on this site, and a lot has changed in that time. I'm not really a website builder / web developer any more. At least not in the way I used to see myself. The freelancing version of me was focused on creating sites on open platform content management systems. I was really into Drupal (still sort of am) and thought it was the way of the future. Well times they have been changin'. Now I am obsessed with the emergence of javascript frameworks. If you aren't sure what I mean go check out knockoutjs, emberjs, angularjs, and reactjs. Not all of those are full fledged "frameworks", but they all are focused around a central idea that the front end should do much more than display static files that are pre-assembled by the server. I couldn't agree more. The benefits of this new construct are so overwhelming that I won't attempt to list them here. I am fully convinced that every application moving forward should take advantage of these emerging technologies.

Over the next few months I am going to be learning as much as I can: building, breaking, comparing, and mastering as much of it as I can. I've already got mastery over knockoutjs (thanks to my current role at Oracle) and I will be using that as a baseline for what each of these other technologies brings to the table. I'm launching a new github repo with a few collaborators, and together we are going to create a single page app with a MongoDB/Express/Node.js backend that simply exposes REST api's to communicate with the front end applications. Yes I said applications, because we will be also building two identical front-ends, one with angular (completing the MEAN stack) and the other with reactjs.

There are many end goals here, but the major ones are:

  • Learn new technologies
  • Compare/contrast the strengths and weaknesses of each including performance
  • Promote our skills with an open source, publicly visible portfolio piece.
  • Create something fun!

I'll continue with updates about the app when we start making noteworthy progress, but I just had to announce this new direction that I am heading because I am thoroughly excited to begin this chapter.