Green grass project looking for innovative technologies

The core of the Footprint Project is alive, and during the next few days I will be organizing a minimum documentation in order to publish the first stable release. The current snapshot is able to generate and sign PDF documents through a concise code - a very good beginning considering the scarce resources of the project. Now it is time to check the outlook and to start discussing the more advanced and valuable features of the project, as follows:

1. To generate a web-service for validating the generated certificates.
2. To generate a client to the web-service
   • a web-application
   • a desktop or rich-client application

I am here playing this fortune teller role in order to guess the chances of the new technologies to survive along the time. My crystal ball is displaying a mix of old labels and novelties like jMaki, JavaFX, Netbeans, Glassfish or EJB3 for example. Some of these technologies are already materialized in the software market, other ones are just whispering good features, prospective ideas waiting a chance to be adopted. We all play these mind games some times, and we know every Open Source project based on pure collaboration - no financial support and very small teams - need some kind of special attraction to be noticed by the Java community. So, our task now is to check the horizon and bet on the winners.

The early adoption of new technologies is a strategy to give the project a chance to survive along the time and also a better chance to be adopted in real world scenarios. My past experiences taught me this strategy works, but it is also very risky and several good ideas suffer premature death due to the excess of effort required by the learning curve and the absence of mind share around the new concepts.

In the other hand, it is not worth basing a project with medium marketing appeal in old and stable technologies because it ends like a scholar work: beauty, nice tailored but extremely boring. That kind of project everyone knows how to do but nobody has time to do, so your project is just something easy to be done and it will probably be overlapped by other project with the same nature - eventually with more resources or just a better pedigree.

The innovation dilemma

Now we have to think about the classical dilemma in software design:

	How to design a software that will be innovative, useful by
	its robustness and easy to maintain with scarce resources?

I will leave the answer for you, I have my own concepts about that but I prefer to wait your thoughts to not influence your suggestions.