The Jason Salas Experience

I'd like to see several programming patterns get a lot of platform-specific and platform-agnostic play in 2006, such that we might all be able to roll our own implementations and really do some cool things in the vein of Web 2.0. If user-generated content is the future of online publishing, we have to embrace new ways of letting people submit stuff to us outside of the browser.

Here are the top three I'd like to see:

• Email-to-form processing - there really isn't an easy way to empower users to be able to send an e-mail message and have it processed by an application other than writing your own custom transport. Which sucks. The SoapMail workspace built on top of WSE 2.0 was supposed to tackle this, but not much of anything's come out of it for mass public use yet. Flickr, Blogger and other services really kick ass because of this enhanced, convinient usability.
  
• Mobile-to-form processing - in a similar vein, .NET really doesn't have this facility readily available and I've been critical of Microsoft about this lack of feature in ASP.NET for years. I'd like to be able to have user-generated multimedia content be submitted by way of SMS/MMS and processed via services on my site for publishing through wireless phones, PDAs, etc.
  
• AJAX-style "autosave" - there are a couple shining examples of doing interval-based autosave, Gmail and Writely. I'd like to see such a generic pattern be developed to show developers how to use JavaScript XmlHttpRequests to periodically commit in-use document states back to a database.
  

What I'm planning on doing is rolling my own implementation of all three patterns, to be released as public APIs into my gallery of services. This way, while encouraging distant-end developers to mash-up and remix our data, we're also passing along some of the core features of the product.

On that note, I enjoy Michael Mahemoff's blog/podcast "Software As She's Developed" for the very reason that he's big into patterns and often discusses their use in more than one major platform.