Ask HN: What are the best technologies you've worked with this year? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What are the best technologies you've worked with this year?

13 pointsinovica8 comments

I've had a great year discovering some new technologies (for us) that we've never used before. We've fully moved over to Python, but I thought I'd try to create a thread that we can all find interesting with a list of the cool and useful technologies that people here have used.

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MongoDB, and CouchDB. Both very similar, very different databases. MongoDB is fast (they say it's almost as fast as writing to /dev/null), has cool update features (i.e. increment count by 4, if count is less than 10), and great documentation, but it's dangerously unreliable by default.

CouchDB is rock solid, and has a very nice map-reduce setup (allowing your aggregations to update themselves quite quickly as underlying data changes), but the documentation is very bare, and it's not very fast (somewhere between 50 updates per second, to 3000 updates per second, depending on how you do things).

The Microsoft Kinect is by far the most genuinely futuristic piece of technology I've used this year. It's something that didn't even exist last year at this time, and has clearly pushed technology, in general, into entirely new territory.

I have been using Gaelyk for some of the projects. It's incredibly intuitive and simple enough for new developers to learn.

I have also played around with Sinatra for a hobby project but did not dig deep into it.

As most of the work I do is Java related, I have to say I'm impressed with Spring Roo it's got serious potential.

http://www.playframework.org/

Enyo. The HP Touchpad has an amazing JavaScript framework that's completely unlike jQuery Mobile or anything else I've seen in the space.

CoffeeScript all day, errday. I actually started making fun of myself for being all giddy when writing some JSON day before yesterday.

backbone.js http://documentcloud.github.com/backbone

Scala and Play.

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