Hecksel's Software Zone

February's 2006 Tech Wow factor There have been quite a few "eye opening" (and a couple jaw dropping) events when keeping track of the Tech industry this month. I thought I'd share the ones that are sticking in my head, and why I think they are particularly interesting or have particular promise: 1) Yahoo Widgets. Or more precisely, the Yahoo Widget Engine and the Widget Developer SDK. SDK you say? Yes. Very interesting. I found this one while trolling the net for new SOA items a couple weekends back. Very interesting marriage of Desktop tools and Yahoo content. I am still a big believer that Mark Cuban had it right in 1999 just before selling broadcast.com : Content is King. Google is getting the press. But Yahoo has a very interesting and increasingly broad set of programmable content. In addition to Widgets, there are alot of other interesting items (like JSON, airfare search, web 2.0 ui design patterns, ... ) on their developer network. Yahoo Widgets http://widget.yahoo.com Yahoo Widget Workshop http://widgets.yahoo.com/workshop/ Yahoo Developer network http://developer.yahoo.net 2) Visual Builder for Ruby On Rails Ruby is another "sleeper" technology that has bloomed but still lacking substantial industry adoption and "buzz". But wait - Ruby On Rails made a splash last summer / fall for Rapid Application Development that was AJAX friendly (note to reader - Ruby will put a twinkle in the eye of any OO purist). But I read over this weekend (Software Development Times - "Ruby: The Little Engine That Could") that ActiveState now has a Visual Builder product for Ruby On Rails. ActiveState you may ask? Yes, ActiveState. ActiveState - the Visual Perl people. I am not a "Perl" person, but the times I have used Perl, I welcomed the ActiveState tool. Now they have Ruby On Rails support in their visual builder called Komodo. Komodo ( ActiveState ) Komodo IDE 3) SPEM 2.0 No, SPEM, not SPAM. SPEM 2.0 made the front cover of Software Development Times (did I mention I read that ). Eclipse is building a process framework around SPEM. This has the potential to automate (or certainly improve productivity in) virtually everything in IT. At least that's how I see it. I'v been doing some thinking of my own related to process meta models related to IT. Keep an ear open for a project called Beacon and the Eclipse Process Framework 4) ActiveBPEL ActiveBPEL 2.0 was released last week. In addition to being written in Java, there is a Visual Designer as well. I have not downloaded either, but the presence of both means that BPEL and BPM has taken another step towards mainstream. ActiveBPEL 2.0 http://www.activebpel.org That's it for now for my "Wow factor" list. ( Feb 27 2006, 08:30:33 PM CST ) Permalink