Languages
The government has, for the first time, mandated a preference for using open source software for future developments.
Five out of six developers recently surveyed by Forrester Research say they have used or are using open source tools as part of their application development or deployment and the top five classes of software used are operating systems, web servers, databases, developer tools and configuration management tools
Read more at zdnet.
Even scanning goes open source these days. Have a look at Ephesoft. It uses JBPM for scan to ECM workflow, and OCR from Google, but you can replace this with e.g. Abbysoft finereader. There is a community edition, and there are supported editions. And, with Move2Alf, we can easily integrate this into Alfresco.
One of the greatest challenges for mobile applications is the synchronicity of data. An interesting solution to the problem is to use the NoSQL database CouchDB. CouchDB, a document-oriented database, is an alternative to SQL databases. With CouchDB you can use cloud functions on mobile devices, work offline with a locally deployed application on a local data storage, and share data with the rest of the cloud when going online again.
Read more at ibm developerworks.