By the end of 2006 we’ll certainly talk about trends in web application development, internet technologies, and so on. There is no doubt that 2006 was the year of AJAX and web 2.0. Frameworks and AJAX implementation over the year become mature and faced almost all important issues to bring developer and simple user the power of JavaScript with Server Side Scripting language and build the web applications of the future, but I it is not yet mature enough as Flash.
Scripting Languages
In scripting language PHP4 still the number one, after all the efforts to bring PHP5 to the public , with the introduction of the PHP5 certification, lot of powerful PHP5 framework for enterprise such Zend framework, Cake PHP, and others … and now we are going to PHP 6 ? I’m not sure how things will be next year, is the community ready to welcome another PHP 6 ??
Database
I don’t know if I was not following the database development very well this year, or there wasn’t any big development. This year there was MySQL5, PostgreSQL 8, Oracle 10g that’s all what I can say. There is lot of big news about oracle but almost all business oriented, no IT Buzz here.
Content Management Solution
Joomla in my opinion was the number one this year, not only for the number of awards that the CMS received but I have personal experience with Joomla and lot of others CMS and sincerely it was so powerful and have really a great community in addition to the number of professional extensions and themes available.
Internet getting more social
Social networks are in top this year, I won’t talk about MySpace, Orkut, Hi5, FaceBook or other from the hundreds if I don’t say thousands of social networks available over the internet. The internet is getting more social, and of course we have to mention social bookmarks, social feed readers, social web applications…
Things that made websites such Digg, Delicious, Magnola, SumbleUpon, and others hit the top of high visited websites and become the source of traffic for lot of bloggers and websites over the internet. If your website and server are not ready to accept high traffic, a good article could be harmful for your website if it hits the Digg home page.
Browser’s war
If you think that IE7 and Firefox are the only popular browsers you are very wrong, Opera, Safari and many others are making really excellent effort to make an excellent browsing experience. This have been said, Firefox seems to have the largest community of users and fans. The growth of Firefox usage this year was the most notable, even with the release of IE7 which somehow just copied the Firefox features.
Service-oriented architecture
SOA is big not only in 2006, but since we started talking about webservices. Now the concept have a technical name, technology independent, and widely adopted. The same time that webservices today are a mature concept, SOA adoption is more and more mature.
This have been said, I’m still facing developers who confuse “webservice” with “web service” and don’t know about XML. This is not the future, it’s today’s technologies !
The web for Mobile
The web is getting more mobile, even that there is not big development around mobile web applications many professionals and big websites are adopting the concept of making mobile edition of their websites. In the same time that you have an RSS feed, it become trivial to make a mobile edition too.
Internet advertising
The internet advertising business have been widely developed and I noticed lot of experiments this year for example Google have expanded their advertising program to Radios. Mobile advertising was big in 2006 and will be bigger in 2007 !
The 2006’s Spamosphere
Last but not least, in the last years we was talking about the blogosphere growth and checking if the blogging will be popular in the future or no. The blogosphere growth still high as usual, but more spam oriented, today there is more new splogs than new blogs created everyday and it’s very bad for the blogosphere.
As I have relaunched the antisplog project I have noticed this big growth of splogs which started adopting different methods and techniques to generate content and pollute the internet. If this will continue without intervention of big actors to stop this phenomena, I’m sure that the blogosphere will be in danger next year.
Web and Telephony
One of my project that I was working on the last years is the VoiceXML PHP framework, in 2006 there wasn’t big technology development planned since even VoiceXML 2.1 will just add few features but it’s very important step before the release of VoiceXML 3.0 which will provide more powerful dialog capabilities that can be used to build advanced speech applications.
Today the web is the first big concurrent of telecoms providers with VOIP, but it’s becoming more standardized as many providers joined the business and started implementing their own platforms and getting their business ready to the future of communication’s protocols.
Happy new year !
Ok so you are ready to welcome the new year ? Since few months we was preparing a bunch of new services to launch it in 2007, and I would like to profit from this very long editorial to thank everybody who contributed in phpmagazine.net and supported our work. I’ll begin with our permanent partners : WebHostinger and Apress Publishing. A big thanks for our permanent members Tom and Karim, and a special thanks for Bruce Painter who helped us with proof-reading. Without you and all others who helped us this community will never exist.
