2014 - year of re-learning

Anyone more than 10yrs in 'Application development and Integration' world must be grappling with the fact that there are a lot of new technologies to learn and may be not sure which direction to pursue in 2014 - here is my guide, 4 roads to travel in 2014.

Before that, what has really changed, when I saw this post, It was clear that the application we built 10yrs back has been slowly making way for the new applications. One thing that has not changed is still the classification of Layers in applications which are Client-side/UI, Server-side/Business Logic/Service/Integration and the Data. There was one more aspect we didn't care much 10 yrs back (now it's known as devops).

10 yrs back all the Client-side and Server-side was combined as one application written in one language such as Java using multiple frameworks. Now what has happened is all these layers have separated and grown to be independent.

• Client-side has grown to be a Thick-client again. great intro
• Server-side has grown to be more reactive. great intro
• And the Data has grown to be a 'polyglot persistence' and just not RDBMS. great intro

So as each tiers have become more and more specialized, time to give special attention to each of them. Here are my 4 roads to travel in 2014,

1. Client-side/UI (Mobile first Road)

• Responsive web-app based on HTML/CSS/JavaScript
• Native app based on HTML/CSS/JavaScript - phonegap/cordova
• Native app based on native technology - iOS, Andriod SDK
• Java 8 > Internet of Things great intro

2. Server-side (Scalability to Elasticity Road)

• reactive applications / async / non-blocking io
• API / Smart integration / cloud integration / social integration /GEO integration
• 100% model driven application development (as Pega puts it)

3. Data (Big Data Road)

• NoSQL
• In-memory Data grid
• Big Data Analytics (Hadoop / R)

4. DevOps (Automation Road)

• puppet
• hudson/jenkins
• maven/python

Lot of roads to travel, thankfully all the roads lead to the same place called 'the new application', happy navigating in 2014.