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Best Programming Practices For Web Developers
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?"
Best programming practice is to do everything server side and not hijack the CPU of the site visitor; not depend on client-side active compatibility (for instance, just tried to pay for an EBay auction today, wouldn't work, don't use Explorer...) if you do server side processing, you can make it work for *everyone*. That alone is enough reason to go for it. 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. Sure, some of this is junk programming, not junk technology, but even so, if the server was doing the work of formatting (like it traditionally has here on slashdot), then it'd just be a matter of my browser reading HTML, instead of trying to run other people's scripts locally. I'd give up the web 2.0 "candy" in a second just to have a reliable web page.
Sadly, I know people will typically go for glitz over functionality, so the only thing that will kill web 2.0 is web 3.0, and I have little doubt it'll be even worse. :(
As for leaning towards good programming practices, my suggestion is to start by taking PHP off your server, learn Python (or Perl if you're feeling feisty) and write something that at least has a chance of being reasonably structured. Keeping in mind I'm a huge fan of Python.
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