Spicer Matthews

Every geek blog I actively read posted a list of top technologies for 2009, so I thought I would be remissed if I did not do the same. These are technologies that really stepped it up or came to my attention in 2009 and became part of my everyday life both for work and personal used.

2009 was all about moving my life to the cloud. I determined early in 2009 it was stupid to ever store a file on my computer ever again. All my data should live in the cloud so I can have access to it everywhere I go, I can have access on any platform (think cell phone), I can easily share my data with people I want to share it with, and lastly I do not have to worry about backups (for the most part), and that is just what I have done.
Below is a list of my top 10 products that have changed my life in 2009. The first 6 are sort of consumer related and the last 4 are software developer related. So if you are not a software developer I am thinking you might only find the first 6 interesting.

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The type of web programing I do often has a large database back-end with which requires user input and data return. In the olden days you just created an html form and then posted some input data to some cgi (say PHP script) and the script would speak with the database and return some html causing the browser to reload on post. Now that we are a super cool web 2.0 world we do not do this anymore we make javascript use Ajax to do the post for us. If you are anything like me you take one look at javascript and say “no thank you”. Most people hate the syntax of javascript, the confusion of the language, or the browser compatibility issues; when I say most people I am including me. This is where our friends at Jquery come to the rescue http://jquery.com (more on them in another post).

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