ThoughtWorks Radar July 2014: Trends in JavaScript, Microservices, Conway’s Law and Decentralization

ThoughtWorks has recently published their Technology Radar July 2014 (PDF) noticing important trends in the JavaScript ecosystem, microservices, Conway’s Lay and infrastructure decentralization.

For this edition of the radar ThoughtWorks has noticed the following trends:

• The JavaScript ecosystem knows a dynamic evolution
• There is an important interest in microservices and much emphasis on web APIs as the connection between the internal world of the enterprise and the outer one
• There is a growing awareness regarding Conway’s Law
• There is a need for decentralization of data and infrastructure following a period of consolidation of Internet and cloud service providers

As it is the case with previous ThoughtWorks radars, the graphic contains four quadrant with four zones each: Adopt – recommended for adoption, Trial – worth trying for projects with lower risks, Assess – recommended for evaluation, Hold – exercise caution. Numbered items appear in a circle when they are in the same position as in the previous radar (January 2014 - PDF) or in a rounded triangle when they are new or have changed places. The following is the Techniques quadrant:

We note here:

• (1) Forward Secrecy (Adopt)- a cryptographic technique that protects previous communications when one session key is compromised
• (8) The Inverse Conway Maneuver (Trial) – which suggests “evolving your team and organizational structure to promote your desired architecture,” ideally reaching isomorphism between technology and business architectures.
• (15) REST without PUT (Trial) – using POST instead of PUT because it separates “command and query interfaces and forces consumers to allow for eventual consistency.”
• (25) DevOps as a Team (Hold) – this is meant to draw attention to the fact that DevOps is a cultural shift and organizations should not create another silo.

For the Platforms quadrant (shown below) we notice the following:

• (29) Hadoop 2.0 (Adopt) has moved from Trial to Adopt. (Hadoop 2.0 is incorrectly depicted in a circle.)
• A large number of platforms are recommended for assessment, including (34) ARM SoC, (35) CoAP – an IoT protocol, (37) Espruino – a controller including a JavaScript interpreter, and (44) Two-factor Authentication.
• Interestingly enough, ThoughtWorks has placed (49) OSGi on Hold because it “solves only a small part of the overall problem, and often adds its own accidental complexity to projects such as more complex builds.”

When it comes to Tools we remark:

• (50) Ansible has moved to Adopt
• (58) Go CD, the CD tool open sourced by ThoughtWorks in March is recommended for Trial.
• A good number of tools have made it into the Assess zone, including (69) Appium – a mobile automated testing framework, (76) Rosylin – Microsoft’s compiler technology, (77) Spark – a big data analytics tool, and (78) Swagger – a RESTful API standard.

For the last quadrant, Languages and Frameworks, we remark:

• (84) Java 8 (Adopt)- ThoughtWorks considers that Java 8 manages to maintain backwards compatibility and in the same time introduces a “deep language change mesh with existing libraries and features,” recommending it for adoption.
• (87) AngularJS, (88) Core Async and (95) R are considered suitable for Trial.
• Some newer languages are recommended to be assessed, such as (96) Elm, (101) Rust and (105) Wolfram.
• (107) JSF continues to be on Hold, ThoughtWorks considering that “JSF is flawed because it tries to abstract away HTML, CSS and HTTP, exactly the reverse of what modern web frameworks do.”