The year of AJAX and REST services?
Martin looks into his clouded crystal ball and sees himself jumping into AJAX and REST services. What about you?
Follow @infoworldIn the Harry Potter series, the Divinations mistress at Hogwarts, Sybill Trelawney, got her job on the basis of one true prophecy, a feat never to be repeated. I'm not sure I've ever gotten even one end-of-year prediction entirely right, but there's another indicator I can look at: where I put my software development and writing efforts. In the early 1990s, I jumped headlong into developing for an iffy emerging technology. I wrote two books and part of a third about it, taught courses about it, reorganized my consulting practice around it, and took on a monthly magazine column about it.
That iffy emerging technology was Microsoft Windows, and the versions that made me really jump in after years of skeptical puttering were Windows 3 and Windows NT. Lest you think that was an easy call, at the time the industry press was all over Novell networking and IBM OS/2 as the serious up-and-coming technologies for business. I did hedge my bets; I kept OS/2 available as a boot option on my DOS/Windows machine, and I worked with a client whose product used Novell networks at hotels, but my main focus was Windows.
[ See our special report on rich Web development tools, including reviews of Microsoft Silverlight, Curl, WaveMaker Visual Ajax Studio, JackBe Presto, Nexaweb Enterprise, Backbase, Bindows, Tibco General Interface, and more open source AJAX toolkits than you can shake a div at. | Keep up with app dev issues and trends with InfoWorld's Fatal Exception and Strategic Developer blogs. ]
I've done a lot of other things since then, but nothing convinced me to spend the time to write another book until recently. You've probably noticed that I've been writing a lot of articles about RIAs over the last few years. I was searching for a technology that could unite the benefits of desktop and Web applications.
