ThoughtWorks Technology Radar July 2011

http://www.thoughtworks.com/articles/technology-radar-july-2011

Highlights...

Continuous delivery
Maximise automation including “infrastructure as code” (see below), environment management and deployment automation. This is about taking control of your deployment process, reducing time the taken to get changes into production from weeks or months to days (or less). This is different from the recent concept of “continuous deployment” which is about putting every change into production (though while different, continuous delivery and continuous deployment dovetail well).

Infrastructure as code
Treat your infrastructure configuration the same as you would treat source code – source control, versioning, push out changes to the data centre in an automated manner.

DevOps
Fostering collaboration between your development and operations teams.

HTML5
Now a viable alternative to native applications and is cross platform.

Stored Procedures
I will quote directly:

“It is startling to us that we continue to find new systems in 2011 that implement significant business logic in stored procedures. Programming languages commonly used to implement stored procedures lack expressiveness, are difficult to test, and discourage clean modular design. You should only consider stored procedures executing within the database engine in exceptional circumstances, where there is a proven performance issue.”

So stored procedures are almost always bad.