Things that will rock the (my) world in 2010
Here are a few things that I’m really looking forward to using and abusing this year:
MongoDB
We’ve all been trying to shoehorn our Web 2.x applications into a 20 year old technology with an antiquated query language. If you haven’t looked into MongoDB, you need to, and you also need to check out MongoMapper.
I went out on a limb back in October and stated that a year from now, we’ll be using MongoDB for most new web apps. I think Mongo will be one of those things like Git that catches on like wildfire.
I have worked on a couple apps now with MongoDB, and it is a lot of fun. It blows my mind just how much our understanding of data modeling is tied to relational databases.
Sammy
Sammy is an awesome little Javascript framework for building RESTful and evented web applications. I’ve only build one little toy app with it so far, but I really enjoyed it and plan to update a couple existing apps an use it on some new ones this year.
Sunspot
If you need to do full-text searching, then Sunspot is your man. I have tried and given up on almost every single solution for doing real full-text searching in applications. I have a reputation around the office for enthusiastically touting several different search solutions as “the one”, only to watch all of them fall on their face in production.
But Sunspot has not let me down yet, and I have one app that has been using it in production for a few months with zero problems. I look forward to abusing it this year.
Rails 3
Two weeks ago, Rails 3 would not have made it on this list. In fact, it would have probably made it on my “things that are totally going to suck” list. I was afraid I was becoming a curmudgeon.
But the Rails core team has kicked it into high gear the past couple weeks. I spent some time playing with Rails (setting up a new app was no easy feat, although now there’s a guide) and digging through the internals and I can now say that I am officially excited.
What are you looking forward to?
I am Brandon Keepers, and I work at