Integrated quantum photonics
As the field has progressed new quantum algorithms have been developed which provide short and long term routes towards the demonstration of the superiority of quantum computers over their classical counterparts. Cluster state computation is now generally accepted as the approach that will be used to develop a fully fledged quantum computer. Whilst development of quantum computer will require the synthesis of many different aspects of integrated optics, boson sampling seeks to demonstrate the power of quantum computation via technologies readily available and is therefore a very promising near term algorithm to doing so. In fact shortly after its proposal there were several small scale experimental demonstrations of the boson sampling algorithm
Natural computing
A quantum computer processes data stored as quantum bits (qubits), and uses quantum mechanical phenomena such as superposition and entanglement to perform computations.
A qubit can hold a "0", a "1", or a quantum superposition of these. 
A quantum computer operates on qubits with quantum logic gates. 
Through Shor's polynomial algorithm for factoring integers, and Grover's algorithm for quantum database search that has a quadratic time advantage, quantum computers were shown to potentially possess a significant benefit relative to electronic computers.