Happy Thanksgiving! I hope you are all having a wonderful holiday weekend. Last year, I posted an article in which I listed and discussed the open-source projects that I found particularly meaningful over the year. Why do this? Well, the idea here is to basically say “thank you” to the open-source projects that I use and to also track year over year how the projects I use frequently change.
Last Year’s picks were ASIHTTP, JQuery, and Rails. There has been a lot of change from 2012. To start, I don’t use ASIHTTP at all anymore and have finally moved on to my own home grown solution that I hope to finally release under an open-source license before the end of 2014; basically, this is because it is no longer supported by the original author and my branch was getting a little more duct-tapped than I was comfortable with. JQuery is pretty much totally out of my toolbox these days; like a lot of developers, I’m feeling that JQuery is a little too hefty for most tasks and have moved to purer JavaScript / CSS tasks that might have been done using JQuery in the past. In a lot of ways, the only project that was listed last year that I’m still actively using is Rails; a lot of that has to do with maintaining existing Rails installs and it should be noted that I’ve cut my Rails usage significantly.
Still, let’s not dwell on the past too much. I have three new projects that have basically taken over my development tool-chain this year: Docker, Java Play, and ASP.Net MVC.
Docker: My infatuation with Dockery has been well documented on Coder Radio, so there is not a lot of need to go into too much detail on why I like it. However, it is worth mentioning that Dockery has become my go to tool for deployment to Linux-based servers. Given the relative newness of the project, it is likely that it will remain one of my “go to” open-source tools into 2014.
Java Play: Java Play Is one of the frameworks that I was evaluating when I decided I wanted to lessen my dependency on Rails. Given that Java has stood the test of time and is one of those technologies that clients don’t need to be convinced of to deploy, I can’t imagine Play not making it into 2014.
ASP.Net MVC: Thanks to Microsoft’s liberal treatment of Azure credits, there had need good amount of demand for MVC from cost conscience clients. MVC was a pretty big part of about half of my year, but as the free Azure credits have dwindled, so has demand. There has been a lot to like in MVC, though I’ve seen a lot of issues with migrations not working the way I would expect them to; still, those migration issues probably have more to do with me expecting it work like migrations in other platforms.
There has certainly been a lot of change from last year’s list and, if I was pressed to find a theme, I’d say that this year I’ve focused on more mature tools, though Dockery is of course very new — still, from a coding perspective I’ve gone a lot closer to “enterprise” (Java / C#) than 2012. Hope you all have an awesome holiday weekend and please leave any comments on Twitter.
