My running theory is that a typical web application is in reality a web service - distributed and reliant application. It is no surprise , I think all experienced web developers know it. On one side we have the server machine which runs HTTP server that is handles traffic to and from our server side application. The technology that is used to build the server side application is irrelevant. Nowadays you can use almost any programming language known to man to build a server side application. It is a matter of taste, really and of course client expectations. What is important is the fact that our application responds to request trafficked through the web server with code that is transmitted to the client using the HTTP protocol, and which is "compiled" into an client application inside the browser Virtual Machine. That client application is then able to send request back to the server for a new set of code which in turn will replace the existing application with a new one.
Well, that was true in the past, and not so much today (I'm talking about web apps here, not pages - I make a distinction between the two) because we have WEB 2.0 client apps that send request to the server for periodic updates for the client side code without the need for the complete user interface deconstruction we always experienced in the past, with what the ASP.NET guys called the old post-back model.
So if we think about our web apps in this way is no wonder that we need a team to build even the smallest of web apps. Excpecially if we wanted to build them right.
Web application developers experience a host of problems regular developers don't even know about. First there is the whole browser compatibily issue. CSS, HTML and javascript do not render on different browser, different browser verisons or event different operating systems in the same way. A piece of client side functionality that works in Firefox on Windows wont work on IE. If we are building a big app, we need specialized teams for each browser family in order to provide the maximum stabiliy and user coverage for our apps. Thats one problem we all know and hate for the life of us. But one problem that is often overlooked and not discussed out loud is the fact that HTML as a UI generating language was not designed to build UI for web applications. The original goal of the language was to ease the disemminationa and aviability of scientific papers between scientist. Not building applications.
And thats a big problem. If you've ever done javascript heavy applications you often encountered problems and you had to generate tons code to solve them , just because you wanted to implement a functionality that would take in desktop application several lines of code to implement.
I'm really glad that with HTML 5 they are going to fix or attempt to fix the problem. And what Micrsoft did with XAML in Silverlight and WPF and Mozilla with XUL is a real step towards the solutions of the problem. Thats how real web applications should be build in the first place. Why do I need to regenerate the entire UI with every click of the mouse, and why do I have wait so much time for stuff that should be handled on the client. The only thing that should be shuffled across the net is Data, not code to be compile again and again on my computer. It is not practical, it is not functional and it is not friendly. And what really bothers is me is the notion that building web applications is easy, is fast and simple and that kids could do it and its not real software engineering work. And what bothers me the most is that the notion often comes from people who know absolutely nothing about web apps.
First you have to wrap your head around the service generated and absolutely reliant client, than you have to learn and really understand five different technologies , of which four are have several critical difference based on the virtual machine they are executed upon (HTML, CSS, JavaScript and XML). The only simple thing (simple in the fact that you have to know one variation at the time ) is the server side language.
And you can do so much with the web, and it really pains me to see that people don't really understand it and to see so much problems that arise from that ignorance that could be easily solved if the applications in questions were developed with little more understanding what it takes to build a web project.
To build a web product you need to have to following people:
A web designer
A graphical artist
A javascript engineer
A RIA animator
A RIA programmer
A server side engineer
A database administrator
A system administrator
A really, really good architect
And what is important a leader with a vision and understanding what the platform requires of the people that are building atop it.
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