Emerging Languages

For more than 5 years, 2 languages have dominated the enterprise software development landscape - Java and C#. Recently, however, this consensus has begun to break down. The interest and demand for different programming languages is being driven by a number of factors: constant pressure for greater developer productivity, increasingly complex business problems, vast amounts of data, and the desire to develop rich applications that run on a plethora of platforms.The recent announcement by Google of the Dart language is just the latest manifestation of this trend.

In this issue of Perspectives, we look at ThoughtWorks' experience using some of these emerging languages.

ThoughtWorkers Liz Douglass and Patric Fornasier share their experience of using Scala on a client project. They discuss some of the anticipated benefits, tools and techniques that they have used, and provide practical advice for those evaluating the use of an emerging language on their projects.

Agile ALM - Redefining ALM with Five Key Practices
In this webinar, Chad Wathington, VP - Product Development, ThoughtWorks Studios, introduces an entirely new and current approach to Application Lifecycle Management (ALM): Agile ALM. To derive the most value from this webinar, we suggest you download the white paper, Agile ALM: Redefining ALM with Five Key Practices, by Cyndi Mitchell, Chad Wathington, and Ethan Teng.

Maintaining Automated 'Acceptance' Tests
This is the fourth installment in a series of webinars on Continuous Delivery that cover topics such as DevOps, leadership and integrating processes, and methods for optimizing the entire production and release cycle. In this webinar, Chad Wathington will cover best practices for keeping your functional test suites long-lived and healthy, from test strategy and tools all the way to coding practices.

Martin Fowler gotoAarhus2011
Martin Fowler discusses his experience at goto 2011 (formerly known as JAOO), which has long been one of his favorite conferences. He also talks about the tutorials he gave with Jez Humble and Rebecca Parsons, and the sessions that he found most interesting; among them, the keynote on Google Dart presented by Lars Bak and Gilad Bracha.

Ola Bini JavaScript in the Small
Ola's most recent project was on a fairly typical Java Web project where there was a component that had to be written in JavaScript. Nothing fancy, and nothing big. It seems like people are still not taking JavaScript seriously in these kind of environments. In this blog post, Ola talks about how his team developed JavaScript on this project.

David Rupp Implementing Continuations in iOs using Blocks
In this blog post, David talks about a native iOS app he's working on that occasionally shows data from a Rails website in a UIWebView. When it does so, it has to make sure the user of the iOS app is authenticated to the web app.

Daniel Temme Some closure (ha!) to 7 Languages in 7 Weeks
Daniel is currently trying to work through a backlog of things he's been meaning to blog about. And at the top is this post. When he last wrote about it, he was somewhere in the middle of week 6, working with Clojure. This is probably his favorite language in terms of learning new things and offering new perspectives while also having enough momentum that he might actually be able to do something with it at some point.

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7 Questions with Joseph Zenevitch
Joseph Zenevitch is a senior project manager at ThoughtWorks, which provides project management services for software development projects. Joseph is also a contributor to O’Reilly’s anthology, 97 Things Every Project Manager Should Know . In this interview, Timber Software catches up with Joseph to get his latest thoughts on project management.

ThoughtWorks' Jez Humble to Present Continuous Delivery to Executive Audience in Chicago and San Francisco
Jez Humble, co-author of the acclaimed book Continuous Delivery, will be speaking at two complimentary, invitation-only executive events on Continuous Delivery in Chicago and San Francisco. These executive events offer IT professionals the opportunity to engage with ThoughtWorks industry experts and to learn how Continuous Delivery is shaping the future of software development. Humble will outline the principles and technical practices that enable rapid, incremental delivery of high quality software, providing an engine for business innovation.

Test automation and Continuous Delivery
Software testing and verification requires a careful and diligent process of impersonating an end user, trying various usages and input scenarios, and comparing and asserting expected behaviors. Directly, the words "careful and diligent" invoke the idea of letting a computer program do the job. In this article, Ranjan Sakalley talks about why he believes that to prepare yourself for Continuous Delivery, you must invest in automation.