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At some point everyone had the sense of encountering something familiar or already read? Maybe even a textbook at school. The title I use is not at all new, and in no way can claim authorship of it.

I'm a little frustrated by the domination of fashion trends over technology. Probably this has happened earlier without noticing it, but since the advent of the iPhone it has become quite tangible. HTML5 has gone to become fashionable, and a number of libraries has come into the world… working on some browsers. It took a while before it can be used in practice, and even now HTML5 is a new technology that still has a long way to go. There was a serious controversy surrounding the use of HTML5 instead of Flash but it is usually not well justified. One of the best materials on the subject I have ever met is http://flashvhtml.com/, the only missing comparison is for development time. Of course, HTML or Flash are simply expression tools and depending on the context and conditions should be chosen by reason and not as a result of a fashion fad.

Then came Node.JS - server usage of JavaScript - based on Google V8 engine of Chrome. Each tutorial begins with "Event driven Non-blocking I/O". Seriously? Is this anything new in programming? However, it is achievable with virtually any platform. The novelty is that it is served in a single thread pack for easy use. Indeed, Node is a promising platform and the latest versions are quite stable and very fast, but please spare me the clichés .

Another modern term lately is “Hypermedia API”. As far as I can understand, it must be a stateless API, which is self descriptive. It may be based on XML, JSON or HTML and any operation should contain links to all other possible operations. It should also contain descriptive metadata. Guess what? It sounds to me like a description of the REST API (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representational_state_transfer) which is some 15 years old architecture. Indeed, REST API is rarely implemented. The most common reason is the increase in traffic.

Just wanted to say - let's not be slaves to fashion and a given technology and respect the work of those who have built the world we live in. There is plenty of technologies to choose which will fit your project.