I know for the last couple of weeks I’ve pushed out at least one post a day fairly consistently. Needless to say, that took some effort. This week I’m slowing it down a bit on the blog posts.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, this is an exciting time to be a developer. One of the reasons that I’ve not pushed out a post for the last couple of day is that I’ve been pretty heads down with some projects that I’m currently working on for my company Caribbean Ideas Ltd. Other than that, there are a whole heap of things out there I’ve I now have to play catch up on due to me being out of the mainstream Engineering & software architecture space for the last year and a half.
My head is pretty much spinning with the number of things that I’m seeing online and that I’d like to take a deeper into. Like the rest of functioning this this particular slice of the STC (space time continuum), I don’t have infinite time at my disposal on your hands though, but I have to do some strategically.
The DART programming Language
Very interesting new programming language designed by some very smart folks over at Google. This language is super easy to follow as it’s similar to many of the languages that we 
use today, but has some powerful features as well. You can write code on the site right from your web browser from either the main page here: http://www.dartlang.org/ or specifically a “try” page here: http://try.dartlang.org/. Be sure to take a look at the language walkthrough from the main page. If you want to get a deeper understanding about the “why” behind the new language then see this video on Channel9 from the LANG.NET conference, be warned, it’s pretty long, but it’s very good: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Lang-NEXT/Lang-NEXT-2012/Dart-A-Well-Structured-Web-Programming-Language
Love the fact that Dart can “compile” to JavaScript today.
GO Programming Language
Another new and interesting Open Source programming language. I only scraped the surface of this one, but it still looks pretty interesting from what I’ve read so far. The language places particular focus on concurrency, while being clean, concise and expressive. I was very interested in the fact that the language seems to compile to native code while still reaping the benefits of runtime garbage collection and type reflection.
It’s also pretty interesting to note that the Google App Engine will allow you to build and run Go application on their platform. You can check this one out here: http://golang.org/. Like Dart, you can also take the language for a spin by writing and running code directly from your browser interface
Google+ API
I’ve been looking into what’s required to plug into the social graph of the web. The Twitter 
and Facebook APIs are pretty well known, but did you know about the Google+ API? Well, here it is, I think they’re still working on it heavily, but you can take a look at it here: https://developers.google.com/+/overview. That’s the overview, but I was primarily interested in the REST API. The Hangout API seemed quite interesting as well. I know that right now, Facebook has the numbers and Twitter is still doing various thing to remain relevant, but I looked at those earlier in the week. I will do a post on all the social network APIs at a later date.
Google App Engine
Not quite sure why I wasn’t very excited when I first heard about this year ago, but after actually checking it out and reading a little more, the Google App Engine looks pretty darn cool. Like the Amazon set of Web Services and Microsoft Azure services, Google App Engine offers you the promise of a robust and scalable platform on which to build and deploy your applications at very low cost of entry.
It seems like all the various ecosystems are maturing, Amazon, Microsoft and Google and as a Architect, you have to be aware of the advancements in these spaces to best inform your product and solution choices.
The App Engine currently supports Python, Java and Go programming languages and looks pretty promising. I encourage you to at least give it a quick look over: https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/whatisgoogleappengine
This is just a handful of things that I’ve been looking into, my head really is spinning a bit. I’ll push out a similar post with some of the other tech that I’ve been looking into later on in the week.
Happy architecting & hacking,
— Cheers
Synthesis - The combination of ideas into a complex whole 