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
Quantum programming
Quil is an instruction set architecture for quantum computing that first introduced a shared quantum/classical memory model. It was introduced by Robert Smith, Michael Curtis, and William Zeng in "A Practical Quantum Instruction Set Architecture". Many quantum algorithms (including quantum teleportation, quantum error correction, simulation, and optimization algorithms) require a shared memory architecture.