Five years ago I chose WordPress to publish the Appvance.com Web site. At the time many people viewed WordPress as blog publishing software. I saw WordPress as a great way to create Web sites because it is very easy to publish new content and create a dialogue with customers. WordPress scales from my blog to the NYTimes.com. Today I also host on WordPress STARLINGwatch.com and VOTSH.com.
The WordPress team recently launched the Calypso project. Matt Mullenweb, lead developer of WordPress, wrote a blog article on Calypso and appears in a Gilmore Gang video interview. Calypso rewrites WordPress using Javascript (prior it was in PHP) and uses a very modern architecture: an all API design using node.js and a Javascript library for building user interfaces using React that is a spin-off from Facebook.
For all my fellow software architects, I recommend you learn about these technology trends:
- DevOps. Agile brought developers into continuous integration (CI), DevOps brings developers into configuration management (CM). Companies that update their apps rapidly have a significant competitive advantage. Facebook updates itself 2 or more times a day. WordPress.org does 140 deploys per day.
- JavaScript ToolKits and Native Development. Developers like code libraries so they can reuse code from project to project. React is a Javascript library for app development from Facebook. While these may work for organizations for a while, Matt Mullenweb in the Gillmore interview cautions that the React/Javascript/Web object approach on iOS just doesn’t work well yet. It’s not tenable to write your app in Javascript and not write it natively. Matt says there are too many deep Javascript crashes in the underlying WebKit code libraries that developers can’t control. That forces you to build a native implementation.
- User messaging, deep linking, and notifications – take a look at Google App Streaming. Apps are becoming a portal to code from other apps. Kind of how Photoshop is more of an operating environment for all the plug-ins than a paint program.
- Scale-Up Architecture. I coined the term Scale-Up Architecture to show how architects are focusing on responsive Web apps, continuous integration and deployment, and scalable data access using Cloud-based commodity servers.
The idea of a single integrated IT stack is no longer part of CIO or CTO plans. Instead they focus on interfaces for replaceable lightweight components. For example, in the data tier Hadoop, Mongo and others battle for developer adoption. Reliance on generally adopted industry standard interface best practices makes it possible to switch components of the stack. And some of vendors partner – for example, the MongoDB connector for Hadoop.
2015 was an incredible year, I hope 2016 for my IT collegues is awesome!
-Frank
