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Best Programming Practices For Web Developers

Posted by kdawson on from the using-hard-won-knowledge dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Web pages have become a major functional component of the daily lives of millions of people. Web developers are in a position to make that part of everyone's lives better. Why not try using traditional computer programming and best practices of software engineering?"

3 of 210 comments (clear)

  1. Re:More than one side to this one... by Isofarro · · Score: 5, Informative

    Then there's Digg; Digg's pages are such a load on the visitor's CPU that I have to click "script not responding, continue?" three times on a page with 800 or so comments with Firefox and a dual-core 2 GHz CPU just to get the page to completely render.

    Sounds like Digg is attaching events to every show/hide link instead of using event delegation and using only one event listener. Browsers can't really handle hundreds of attached event listeners, it is a known performance issue.

    Now using event delegation instead of attaching hundreds of events should definitely be in a set of web development best practices.

  2. Re:More than one side to this one... by tajmahall · · Score: 5, Informative

    Actually when /. articles have 700 comments or so I need to answer the "script not responding" error message several times.

  3. They didnt work so well for trad projects by supersnail · · Score: 4, Informative

    Traditional projects using so called "best practices" fail with atonishing regularity.

    Most project failures are covered up by tha management but in environments such as UK government projects where public scrutiny makes it imposible to spin failure into success the failure rate is about 60%.

    In my experience the private sector is just as bad they are just better at redfining success to be whateever crud was delivered, or, quietly cancelling projects and pretending they never happened.

    I would also posit that "traditional" best practices are a big contributer to these failures.
    Among the many problems:-
                1. Analysts paying lip service to user requirements but actually ramming thier own pet vision down the customers throats.
                2. Equating expensive with good. Which leads to chosing ludicrously expensive and inappropriate software where something cheap and free would have worked just as well.
                3. Dumping existing working software because it is not "re-usable" for a "re-usable" design which doesnt work.
                4. Spending eons of time perfecting design documents and diagrams as if they were the end product not just a tool for getting there.
                5. Treating all developers as equals. They arent. If you dont recognise and cherish your start programmers you will lose them.
                6. Failing to reconise the simple fact that if you dont deliver something by the second year the prohject will get canned.

    --
    Old COBOL programmers never die. They just code in C.