InfoWorld’s 2013 Technology of the Year Award winners

Chosen from all the products we reviewed, tested, worked with, explored, and relied on throughout the year, InfoWorld’s Technology of the Year Award winners represent the best of the best for end-users, developers, IT pros, and the businesses they serve. They’re not just the best products we’ve seen, but the most innovative, timely, and fun. They’re the ones we don’t want to imagine living without.

See also:

• The best hardware, software, and cloud services of the year

Last month the W3C announced that it was publishing the final specification and definitions for HTML5 and Canvas 2D. You’re forgiven if you thought that HTML5 was already standardized, considering the impact the new specs have already had on Web and mobile development. HTML5 is the new formula for modern Web experiences, and the measure of modern browsers.

The Candidate Recommendation phase will likely last through most of 2014 as the W3C works up interoperability and performance testing models. Meanwhile, the final spec serves as an important baseline on which developers and vendors may begin to anchor plans for adoption going forward. 

— James R. Borck

This Web framework, courtesy of a few smart apples at Twitter, solves so many of the most common problems in Web design, and with such elegance and simplicity, that we pity any designer not familiar with it.

Bootstrap uses a 12-column layout, which automatically resizes based on the display device. Every common interface component, from drop-down menus to breadcrumb trails to styled buttons, are preprogrammed into the Bootstrap CSS and can be tweaked as needed with an additional style sheet. Best of all is the customizer, which lets you create and download a version of Bootstrap modified to your needs without having to spelunk by hand through the style definitions.

— Serdar Yegulalp

At the beginning, the idea behind Node.js seemed ludicrous. Who’d want to trade all the wonderful abstraction and programmer-liberating freedom of the thread model for all the drudgery of making sure your code can’t deadlock? Who would want to try to keep nesting methods inside of methods inside of other methods just because that’s how JavaScript loves to toss them around?

Programmers may debate these issues for years to come, but Node.js will continue to gain converts as long as it offers fast performance and a friendly syntax for everyone who grew up programming JavaScript.

— Peter Wayner

The third time is definitely the charm for PowerShell, which provides the engine behind the bulk of all management tools for Windows Server 2012. PowerShell 3.0 brings Windows Workflow Foundation support, time- and event-driven job scheduling, a much-improved Integrated Scripting Environment, and a remoting capability that’s fully integrated with Active Directory permissions, making it possible for administrators to execute commands on any machine (Windows 7 or later) on the network. PowerShell boasts an active user community with forums and contributed “cmdlets” available for download from the Microsoft Script Center. If you’re not already familiar with PowerShell, now is a great time to get started.

— Paul Ferrill

The QNAP TS-EC1279U-RP rack-mount IP SAN and NAS boasts dual 10G Ethernet interfaces alongside 1G copper interfaces, redundant power supplies, and 36TB raw capacity with 3TB SATA drives. It speaks just about every file sharing protocol under the sun, ties in with Microsoft Active Directory and LDAP for authentication, and supports VMware vSphere, Citrix XenServer, and Windows and Hyper-V failover clustering. It can even handle real-time and block-level replication with encryption and compression. For the small-to-medium workload, that’s plenty of bang for a street price under $5K (without disk).

— Paul Venezia

Run servers in the branch office while keeping their storage in the data center? That’s the magic of Riverbed Granite, a groundbreaking technology that “projects” iSCSI storage volumes located in the data center out to a hypervisor running in a remote site. To the hypervisor, the volume appears as locally accessible storage. Riverbed uses some special juju to accelerate VMFS and NTFS over the WAN, making it possible to boot a virtual server from a file system at the other end of the link. The net result: The branch office can have its server, while the data remains under central IT control. And no more remote backups!

— Keith Schultz

An open source platform for residential and commercial building automation, OpenRemote works with off-the-shelf hardware and allows users to integrate any device or protocol, design their own user interfaces, and automate systems to create intelligent buildings. The software runs on Windows, Linux, Mac, Raspberry Pi, and specialized automation platforms, and it scales from one-room media centers up to large commercial installations. In a traditionally proprietary market, OpenRemote brings the house of the future to the rest of us. But far from solving your “first-world problem” of wanting to control your lights with your Android or iPhone, this is the stuff of a greener and more accessible future.

— Andrew Oliver