Overwhelming Technology

This is a ranting post. :D

After army, I went for several interviews and learnt about Ajax from one of my interviewers. Ajax is a development technique for creating interactive web applications by the way, and had been around for quite some time, so it's me just out of sync. :D Included here to to make my mess sound messier. :P

Upon landing in Radixs, I got back in touch with Flash, which had moved 2 versions up from Flash MX to Flash 8. I made it point then to upgrade myself from coding with ActionScript 1.0 to ActionScript 2.0, from procedural programming to true OOP.

While playing with OOP, I stumbled upon Design Patterns, which spurred a lot of interest in me. Coming from a design background, I had always wanted to write cleaner codes which are efficient, reusable and scalable. Furthermore, it'll make me a lot geekier. :D

I borrowed the book, Head First Design Patterns, from the company's library and dived right in. It is at this time when Adobe announced the arrival of Apollo! I heard about the purpose of Apollo way back in November 2006 during the Adobe MAX Conference in Singapore, so was actually pretty excited that the alpha release is finally out! Apollo is a cross-OS runtime that allows developers to leverage their existing web development skills (Flash, Flex(Flex?), HTML, Ajax) to build and deploy desktop Rich Interactive Applications (RIA).

So ermz... What's Flex?? Again this belongs to the category of "something heard but no research ". Figured out that it is a SDK(software development kit) for a group of technologies to support the development and deployment of cross platform, RIA's based on their proprietary Flash platform. So on I went to seriously study on the Flex's framework of MXML and ActionScript 3.0.

At this period, Adobe CS3 was launched as well, and while everyone is so excited with the new set of tools available, Microsoft came out with Silverlight! Tada!!! What's that...... again??! It's supposed to be something flashy, like Flash(compare the name and you'll get the idea), with hopes of displacing Flash dominance on the web market. Read up some articles and found out it's a new code name for something that existed for quite some time.

***Deleted a paragraph of extra ranting on the history of WPF, the XAML & C# combination, which I felt was totally unnecessary :D***

Ok got passed that. Dint bothered with it. My hands are already full at the moment with Flash, Flex and Apollo. Then another bang came a few days ago when Sun Microsystems announces the arrival of JavaFX!! JavaFX is Sun's way of killing Flash, Ajax and Silverlight.

With so many new technologies appearing at seemingly such a short period of time, I must say I'm overwhelmed. Carefully, I thought through all these things, and came up with this "insight", or rather common sense. :P

All these new technologies, new scripting languages, are just for people who are specialised in that particular field, to leverage their existing skill sets onto more kinds of platforms, allowing them to build more interactive products that are able to reach a deeper and wider market.

Personally, I'm an advocate for the Flash Platform, but the competition between the major companies got nothing to do with me! All these new technologies are good to know, just in case one day I need to know them to deploy something, and that one day is not today!

My plan will be to stay focus on Flash, Flex, Apollo, learn AS3, MXML, Cairngorm, design patterns and some server side coding and database language to get up to speed with deployment(most probably being PHP & mySQL here). Focus focus focus... that's the way to survive all these bombarding new tech. Oh gosh... I wonder what's next.

I don't want to become a jack of all trades, but master of none anyway. :P