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."

Comments

Web development is hard for even talented people.

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

[khendron]

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.