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HTML Web App Development Still Has a Ways To Go
GMGruman writes "Neil McAllister was helping out a friend whose web developer disappeared. Neil's journey into his friend's website ended up being an archaeological dig through unstable remains, as layers of code in different languages easily broke when touched. Neil realized in that experience that the ever-growing jumble of standards, frameworks, and tools makes web application development harder than it needs to be. Although the Web is all about open standards where anyone can create variations for their specific needs and wants, Neil's experience reminded him that a tightly controlled ecosystem backed by a major vendor does make it easier to define best practices, set development targets, and deliver results with a minimum of chaos. There's something to be said for that."
Even for excellent software developers, web development is difficult. It's not the concepts that are difficult, per se, but rather the jumble of half-backed hacks that make up ever layer of the web stack. The foundation is so weak that anything built upon it just can't stand well, even if it itself is well-designed (given the constraints of web development).
Just look at the common open source technologies used by many web sites. MySQL is one buggy hack upon another. PHP is much the same, plus some security holes.
HTTP has been over-extended well beyond its original use (cookies are a hack to get around its statelessness, it's caching mechanisms are fucked to high heaven, SSL and TLS are hacks).
JavaScript is perhaps the most horrid hack of them all. Something meant for adding minor interactivity to a page has been misconstrued as being suitable for large-scale application development, although it lacks many of the most basic features necessary to do that sort of development effectively.
It's difficult enough to fight with unclear and conflicting requirements alone. Toss in shitty technology, and it becomes very difficult even for the best seasoned professionals to develop even just mediocre software systems.
The problem is not the tools (well, not *always* the tools), but the developers. You can provide the best development tools in existence to an incompetent developer, and you will end up with a crap website. It has nothing to do with the quality of the tools or the maturity of the application frameworks.
Hell, humans have been building houses for 1000s of years, yet an incompetent builder can still build a house that will fall apart. I don't think the problem is that the hammer and saw still have a ways to go.
Life is like a web application. Sometime you need cookies just to get by.
Off the top of my head, here are a few problems with the mryiad of many frameworks for the web:
1) The super-ultra-awesome slider you want is for YUI but the rest of your site uses jQuery. If you want to use it, you'll have to have the browser pull down both jQuery AND YUI.
2) Many of the frameworks conflict--prototype, for example, doesn't play nicely with a bunch of other frameworks.
3) Each framework added to your stack increases the number of moving parts on your site. More moving parts = more chance for error.
Seriously, it is a cruel joke when you find the-most-perfect-rich-text-editor but it was for MooTools instead of YUI.
*That* is my problem with having so many frameworks. The world would be a better place if we all just used jQuery :-)
There are a couple of problems I see in web development:
1) Unlike the systems programmers, myself included, for a given topic area tools are adopted and standardized.
Web developers seem to get jobs based on the flavor scripting language of the year.
(All of which is crap in my opinion....i.e. php, javascript....python...)
It always seemd too me, that XML, XSLT CSS and Java servlets are really all you need and you can build marvelous interfaces. Tried that once, but the response I got was (thats too hard, lets use javascript).
2) The closest I have come to a decent application framework for building web apps is Java. It has clear security controls, recognizes the importance of Virtual Machine technology to compartmentalize access in a dangerous online world. It even has a very straightforward debugging environment which is quite impressive to track down bugs.
But curiously, it is shunned because if you don't know the scripting language flavor of the day, people don't want to build web sites or won't hire you.
Which is one of the reasons why I don't write web applications anymore. Because when your job and pay is based on how fast you can memorize the scripting flavor of the year, and it doesn't bring anything new to the table (in many ways it can be even worse) to solve the problem of writing a web app, well...it becomes just a money game.
I mean really, I don't mind learning new languages, but I haven't seen anything new since Java 1.6 was released that is any better...just mostly worse.
3) Finally the field has become too greedy. I mean, there is no reason why it has taken this long to standardize video and audio, except for the fact that greed is everywhere.
It is really sort of disgusting, and the crap you have to go through to get video onto a persons browser is just way over the top, mainly due to Adobe and Apple being greedy idiots.
Maybe when the Video and Audio tags get full support for open protocols I will write web apps again. It isn't rocket science, but it is currently a science of idiocy.
-Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.