Download Gartner MQ for Enterprise Search

Gartner has released its 2013 MQ for Enterprise Search. Get your complimentary copy here:

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/itanalyst/default.aspx

Is Enterprise Architecture losing interest ?

Google Trends is an interesting tool to measure general interest in any topic based on the number of search queries made for that topic. So, today I decided to try for ‘Enterprise Architecture’ and was surprised seeing the results.

The interest in Enterprise Architecture as a topic has been constantly decreasing over a period of last few years based on queries submitted. Though the news published related to EA has increased.

So what this signifies ?

To understand the above trend I tried correlating it with Gartner’s Hype Cycle on EA and things were much clearer.

Yes, EA as topic has moved from Peak of Inflated Expectations to Trough of Disillusionment. People know that it is not a magic wand and requires lot of hard work to get value out of it. It is important and so it is getting institutionalized instead of just being a buzzword. I am sure from here we will only see rising interest in it in coming years.

DART : Overview of Google’s new web programming language

So finally, the technology has started moving on the client side of web too, faster than we expected. After many years of using HTML, JavaScript, ActiveX, Flash & Silverlight came the big innovations like HTML5 & CSS3.

Here comes the latest from Google, called DART – Structured Web programming language. Personally I have never been happy with JavaScript due to readability, maintainability & lack of support of good developer tools.

So what is DART ? Here are few highlights:

• Open source project
• Class-based programming language (not mentioned as object-oriented language) 
• Moving to more structured environment. It supports classes & libraries. This is what JavaScript lacked though supported in unstructured way.
• Optional types. This is interesting as this will allow you to start prototyping your application quickly using JavaScript style programming with simple and untyped code and then as you progress in application lifecycle convert the code from untyped to typed style which is easy to debug, understand and maintain.

Google promises to provide the right tooling support to leverage the enhancements done over javascript in Dart.

Design goals of Dart as mentioned by Google :

• structured yet flexible
• familiar & natural
• high performance & fast application startup
• full range of devices on the web – phones, tablets, laptops & servers
• support across all major modern browsers – the current test environment does not support IE.

Deployment/Execution Models

• Translate Dart code to JavaScript and run it in browsers today except IE.
• Execute Dart code in a virtual machine on server side
• Use Dartboard to write and execute code snippets in browser window except IE
• Proposes a new MIME type called ‘application/dart’ so that it can be embedded or imported into HTML pages.

Dart & HTML5 – Dart will have HTML5 Dom library to interact with HTML elements

I feel Dart will help in making the web richer without compromising the developer productivity. JQuery is helping a lot currently in this aspect on top of JavaScript. Based on the acceptance of Dart, JavaScript may continue to remain popular.

It would have been better if instead of releasing a new language, Google had advocated such advances in JavaScript itself.

With Google Chrome making big advances and may soon become second most popular browser, it could dare to take such a bold step.

http://www.dartlang.org/