The 2005 platform for application development
One factor that has always figured into my career choices, and one that I explicitly considered when choosing Jobster, is the technology platform that the product is being built upon.
8 years ago when I left the Unix world to join eRoom and build on NT 4.0, it was in large part because I had been playing with betas of NT 4.0 for the previous year and saying "wow, this is cool"... Microsoft had packaged the incredible complexity of a modern operating system into a usable, well-integrated package with awesome development tools, great support for networking and a consistent, familiar user interface.
How times change. Today, some of the most interesting application development in software is being done on a strange hybrid platform of DHTML + Win client tidbits + J2EE server back-end, and it has reached a richness in tools and capabilities unmatched by any other platform. I thank Scott Haug for setting me down this path of discovery - one email from him prompted dozens of hours of reading and sifting through the past 5 years of progress in this peculiar mishmash of Java and open source tools which somehow come together to make a very powerful combination.
This is pretty bad news for Microsoft, because the only piece of this pie left for them is the itty bit of Windows client code that runs the taskbar tray doodad, or browser plug-in or toolbar or what have you, that facilitates integration of the new web-based services with legacy Windows client data.
8 years ago when I left the Unix world to join eRoom and build on NT 4.0, it was in large part because I had been playing with betas of NT 4.0 for the previous year and saying "wow, this is cool"... Microsoft had packaged the incredible complexity of a modern operating system into a usable, well-integrated package with awesome development tools, great support for networking and a consistent, familiar user interface.
How times change. Today, some of the most interesting application development in software is being done on a strange hybrid platform of DHTML + Win client tidbits + J2EE server back-end, and it has reached a richness in tools and capabilities unmatched by any other platform. I thank Scott Haug for setting me down this path of discovery - one email from him prompted dozens of hours of reading and sifting through the past 5 years of progress in this peculiar mishmash of Java and open source tools which somehow come together to make a very powerful combination.
This is pretty bad news for Microsoft, because the only piece of this pie left for them is the itty bit of Windows client code that runs the taskbar tray doodad, or browser plug-in or toolbar or what have you, that facilitates integration of the new web-based services with legacy Windows client data.