Wow I honestly never thought I would see the day that our web development comes full circle. A huge drive to pull people into RAD type web development using tools like Visual Studio and ASP.NET has left a plethora of unwanted, ugly web applications on the inter and intranet. Applications that were stuck together by code samples and !PostBack checks. These sad applications where pioneers though. The road to web 2.0. The big 2.0! I mean the internet has been around for years and the web is only on version 2? What a crock, sorry, I just think it is. For some reason we have this need to version things, probably so we can measure progress. Kind of feeble if you ask me but moving along.
Coming from a PHP background I had experience in the XMLHttpRequest thingy-ma-bob now referred to as AJAX. So then I shifted in development with the C# and ASP.NET. Hacking, licking and sticking and fighting all my urges I continued to ugly ASP.NET way of developing web applications. Then came along ASP.NET MVC. Finally! Something we can work with!
So in my bits and pieces investigations into this new framework I came across JQuery. Well a very handy JavaScript framework that makes interacting with the DOM far easier. Now this is where things get really interesting. While reimplementing a front end I have done for a project I am working on I started digging deep into the JQuery framework and started noticing strange things. Validation routines that looked similar to ones I wrote 10 years ago, traversing forms, checking response text from Ajax requests. Then it hit me! Nothing has changed, absolutely nothing!
We might have slightly better ways of doing things now but the premise is the same. Don’t get me wrong, I am happy that control has been given back to the developers but really, where the heck did it go wrong? The trends I generally notice in software is this. The new technology comes out, people write frameworks for it, n00bs leverage off the frameworks destroying the framework and then the technology proficient people rewrite it.
I mean honestly. Has there been any technological break through in the past 10 year? No, I do not mean a new gadget, or another social networking site. These are not a break through. They are merely software products leveraging if existing platforms. There has not been a significant break through in years! Nothing, nada, zip, zero, ziltch. It appears that with the highly successful social network applications that people no longer want to progress technology as opposed to leveraging off the data mining and marketing opportunities available using these platforms. It is no longer the art of development as it is the rolling out of reams of code that stop gap and facilitate data mining off these frameworks. No longer is development a craft, it is a production line. Screw on the toothpaste cap and let it go out the door.
I see a future though. One day all the hype is going to collapse, the sun will rise from behind the smog caused by the coal burning social platforms churning out zombies. People will awaken from the sleep, rubbing there eyes and looking to the sunrise as the true developers march forward, clearing the way and making the internet a useful network again! Yes I know it is dramatic but you gotta love it! HOOAH!