The akquinet tech@spree Technology Radar is now available

akquinet tech@spree has published a technology radar analyzing the trends of 2011–2012. It provides an overview of the evolution of practice in the Information Technology sector in 2011 as well as a forecast for 2012. It is the result of one year of analysis and synthesis performed by the Innovation department of akquinet tech@spree.

The technology radar captures the output from discussions, experiments, projects, and feedback from customers and developers. It synthesizes the results to inform global technology strategy decisions. It focuses on new technologies and methodologies with a high level of attraction. This document does not aim to provide an in-depth presentation of each technology, focusing instead on conciseness and highlighting the trends and state of the practice.

More information on http://radar.spree.de

Deploying Play Framework applications with Puppet

Puppet is a configuration management tool made to ease the management of your infrastructure by making it more traceable and easier to understand. It allows infrastructure-as-code, a major trend today to deal with the complexity of infrastructure management.

On the other side, Play framework is a promoting a new way to build web applications, making this sort of development more efficient and productive. By avoiding the turn over (compilation-packaging-deployment-navigation) after every change, it makes web development fun again.

This blog post explains how you can deploy your Play applications using Puppet. This allows you to develop web apps in a very productive way and deploy them reliably.
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Creating Web Applications with Play! – An introduction

Play! is an open-source framework for building web applications in Java or Scala. It is stateless and promotes RESTfulness: it embraces web-oriented architecture. But best of all, Play is simple, fast and ultimately fun. It is also pretty powerful and allows the development of sophisticated web applications in an efficient way. akquinet is now using Play as the basis for different applications.

To illustrate how easy and powerful Play is, this blog post presents a miniature web application.

It’s a basic library interface, where books may be checked out and returned at the press of a button. Then, the page reloads and the updated availability status is shown.

The following is just a small sample of what Play can do. Play is a sophisticated framework with many other features that we don’t have room to represent here (such as excellent support for testing, the ability to configure dynamic routing to create clean, RESTful URLs, and access to a wide variety of modules such as user authentication), but the intention of this post is simply to show how Play can enable you to build powerful web applications quickly and easily.
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