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HTML Web App Development Still Has a Ways To Go

Posted by kdawson on from the walled-gardens-keep-the-wind-out dept.

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."

6 of 279 comments (clear)

  1. This just in... by sunking2 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Knowing how to code is easy. Being a decent software engineer isn't. 90+% of web developers fall into the first category.

    1. Re:This just in... by ducomputergeek · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The problem I find with web developers is that they are too busy chasing the "Ohh shiny" of the month. I've worked off and on with a development group over the years usually as their systems & database guru during the planning stages. This is usually once or twice a year. And each time they are using a different framework "Because it has killer feature xyz". But then they get into it and it seems like it won't do A or B and they end up coding their own.

      Meanwhile, at the day job, we had a project that was very close to something I did 12 years ago and wrote in perl5. I dusted off the old scripts, installed, changed the path to perl to the new system and was up and running in less than an hour. I had to update a few lines of code to use new perl modules, but a decade later it still worked. We rewrote the backend to use PostgreSQL instead of flatfiles and updated the template files so the web pages generated don't look like something out of the NS4 days, but maintenance has been a breeze.

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      "The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
    2. Re:This just in... by R_Dorothy · · Score: 5, Insightful

      On the flip side: Being a decent software engineer doesn't make you a good web developer. I've had to deal with a site built by decent software engineers who didn't understand the web and it fell seriously short in SEO, content management, analytics, degradation and a slack handful of other stuff that's second nature to a decent web developer.

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      Stupid flounders!
  2. "tightly controlled ecosystem"? Bullshit... by Assmasher · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The problem with web app development is that the environment was never intended for interactivity, it was designed for displaying information. Everything added since then to create 'apps' has been bolted on (sometimes cleverly, sometimes not so cleverly) and implemented differently between browsers and (relating to plugins/extensions) differently between operating systems. Developing for x86 machines running Windows and/or Linux isn't a "tightly controlled ecosystem" but you can certainly develop excellent applications, why? Because the environment was intended to run applications.

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  3. Mostly by Poodleboy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I can agree with all of this except the "backed by a major vendor" part, which seems superfluous... Design is all about maintaining a coherent vision of the end product, whereas hammering a tin shed on the side of the Taj Mahal is always a bad idea, particularly for maintainability and robustness. What isn't clear to me is why I need a vendor to supply my vision when I've already had years of education and experience...

  4. His anecdote seems orthogonal to his point... by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I honestly don't understand how an anecdote about a seriously fucked server setup is relevant in the slightest to the pros or cons of "HTML web apps" or their development.

    With HTML, whether the shiniest of web 2.0 or the seriously old-school stuff, there is clear separation between the client(where "standards" such as they are, matter) and the server, which can do absolutely whatever it likes, so long as it responds correctly to a few HTTP messages.

    If you want to deliver a webapp, the development of your client component is, indeed, somewhat constrained by the fact that "web standards" are more evolved than designed, and are somewhat inconsistently implemented. If you want to discuss the cons of web-apps, horror stories in this vein are the anecdote to use. If you want to discuss the pros, heroic tales of multiplatform, install-free deployment are to be used.

    On the server side, though, the vices and virtues of web standards(aside from seriously uncontroversial stuff like TCP/IP and HTTP GET) are basically irrelevant. It's your server. You can do whatever you want to deliver HTML, CSS, and javascript, and interpret responses from your clients. Totally in-house stack? If you feel like it. Modestly customized OSS job? Sure. Some single-vendor enterprise development solution? If that is how you roll. The fact that somebody's web-dev fucked up and then disappeared just seems completely irrelevant(can you think of any type of development, application or otherwise, where "the developer fucked up, then disappeared, and we had to call somebody else in to do a mixture of archeology and pacification" has ever been a good thing?)