Five Web Technologies to Keep Your Eye On

The web is going through a growth period right now similar to the late 90s with new technologies popping up and older technologies maturing. I decided to put a list together of the things I see as important.

Java

Java is getting better, but it is still a very problematic language to deal with. Incompatibilities between minor versions have been rampant since day one and although the problem still exists, the power of Java is undeniable. The biggest holdback for mainstream java implementation is the learning curve. Java does have advantages over other web languages like php, ruby, and perl, but the ease of installation, legacy support, and strength of documentation for other languages keeps them on the forefront while Java has been relegated to enterprise applications and server side optimizations. As Web 2.0 interactivity becomes more important to basic web sites, java will once again gain interest and marketshare. I honestly don't see ease of use on the horizon for Java.

Comet

With all of the interactivity sites getting more and more popular, a stronger infrastructure mechanism needs to be in place to expand the capabilities of interaction. As far as I know, Comet was originally conceptualized in a blog post and both the apache team and the lighttpd developers started working on how to implement it. Basically, it's a better mechanism for the push technology we heard so much about in the '90s that never really took off.

JSON

JSON is Javascript Object Notation. It's not complicated and there's not a lot to it. It's just a simple structure for exchanging data. The thing about JSON is that it does not have structural requirements or verbose syntactical overhead that XML does and it is much easier to deal with from a programming perspective in most web friendly languages. JSON will pop up more and more, but it won't take over the XML world completely - there are still a few good reasons for using XML and too many people would be bent out of shape about all that time they spent learning XSLT if they were asked to give it up

Distributed File Systems

Hadoop is the one most people have heard of, but there are a lot of projects right now concerning the usage of a distributed file system. While Seagate does have plans for 37 Terabyte drives, there is still the need to be able to distribute data quickly, for failover mechanisms, and for highly scalable architectural requirements for applications. Expect MS and Oracle to come up with proprietary mechanisms. Expect Oracle's to be good and way too complicated. Expect MS to be almost as good as your garden variety open source software.

Spam Management

Norton was in the right place at the right time to produce antivirus software and disk management utilities. Now they are on virtually every PC in america. Expect another company to hit the nail on the head with spam protection. Norton and McAffee have left the market wide open with far-from-stellar offerings and knowledge of bayesian filtering mechanisms is becoming more and more widespread among developers.