“Build it and he will come…”
That is a reference to the movie “Field of Dreams” where Kevin Costner’s character hears a voice that tells him to build a baseball field in the middle of his farm. While the idea sounds crazy, you have to start building a project with nothing more than a prompting to get started.
This blog will be an exercise in just writing what I am doing in the technology world and to learn to be consistent in writing, more specifically, I will be sharing ideas for writing code, some projects I’m working on, new technology ideas and see what sticks.
Primarily, this blog will focus on front end development of hybrid mobile applications and desktop applications based on the JavaScript framework packages. I will also delve into my thoughts of what’s useful or not.
Now with that said, there seems to be many different technologies that are starting to crawl out of the woodwork. Some of the tech has the potential to solve some real problems, however other “solutions” are a form of “vaporware” which will be marketed widely, but when the marketing doesn’t take, will vanish like Silverlight or HDDVD.
It takes some time to learn a new framework or language and even more time to develop an application, so how do you avoid investing your time in a language or a framework that is going nowhere?
I don’t claim to have a crystal ball or know the future, however if you are reading this blog, you do your research and get a couple of different perspectives.
Here are some of my thoughts:
1 – Be contrarian: if you see a product/service/tech that is heavily promoted in popular media, then be weary of it.
2 – Find out the value of the tool: Does it solve a problem that another (open source) solution already solve? Are there lower cost or free alternatives?
3 – Is it being used?: Are their other companies or groups using the products/solutions?
4 – What is the mind share of the tool?: How many people are using the tool for their project?
1 – Be contrarian. One of the sure ways you can tell if you are in a financial bubble (over-inflated prices of a market) is when the news media such as TV, Newspaper, High volume news sites start saying about real estate, dot com stocks, Bitcoin, etc. saying that you need to get in before you lose out. If this is true about financial bubbles, this is likely also true about hyping up new technology. In this case, it would take the form of several technical books written about a new framework, Tech “Evangelists” who promote a given framework, Free lunch seminars given by a mega marketing software giant. You get the picture.
2 – Find out the value of the tool. Microsoft Silverlight for example does have some nice bells and whistles that Adobe Flash doesn’t have, however with the new open source standards that HTML5/CSS3/JavaScript was coming out with that you don’t have to pay licensing fees for and is ported to every platform, why use EITHER Flash or Silverlight when HTML/CSS/JS has the capabilities of both without the cost or other problems associated with proprietary solutions.
3 – Is it being used?: Do research on who is using a given platform or technology and what solutions integrate into this. AngularJS is used in many SPA (Single Page Application) websites and in addition is the core framework which Ionic (Mobile Hybrid Framework) uses for developing mobile applications.
4 – What is the market share of the tool. Initially, when I was looking at a mobile cross platform framework, I was looking at Xamarin which appealed to me since I knew how to write code in C# and would not have to relearn a framework. There was TONS of marketing in the search engines and books, speakers, etc. This made me weary (see 1 – Be contrarian) so I looked up info related to the mind share Xamarin has and it represents about 2% of the market versus over 50% of cordova/phonegap. This led me down the path of researching cordova, then Ionic. Hybrid mobile apps are used everywhere both internally at companies and externally on Google Play and iTunes.
In either case, this is my though process on distinguishing between marketing hype of tech and what is actually will take hold and solve problems for you and your client.
If you have any ideas to share, please feel free to post or send me an email.
roy@customizedcode.us