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Changing times for web developers

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Re: Changing times for web developers

#61

Post by pserwylo »

Osmose wrote: post #59
wildranter wrote: post #52

The web is a mess. Where's the news in that? Code once and run in all platforms is pretty much a myth no matter the framework you use, including the web ecosystem. I've lost count of how many times I wished we could run in the browser a decent language like python or ruby. Or describe the data of documents in something more meaningful like JSON instead of HTML. And then there's the DOM, CCSS, and all the browser spec…

I'm confused about the JSON > HTML part of your comment. Independent of which one is better overall, wouldn't HTML be more meaningful than JSON because it has semantics attached to tags?

I've been working working working on a relatively complex user interface in JS at work lately (merging suspected duplicates from a CRM together, and specifying which fields from each duplicate contact is the "correct" field) . It involves a lot of DOM manipulation and user input/feedback.

We make use of a jQuery in our app, and I was quite happy to see that although I develop in Chrome and Linux, the UI worked pretty much flawlessly on Firefox and Opera on Linux, and IE8 (and methinks 7, but can't remember) on Windows.

We may be lucky in that we can ignore IE6 and earlier Firefox and Chrome, but my point is that something like jQuery does a damn fine job of abstracting away browser differences. May not be perfect, but better than we can afford to do.

I say this because we probably all aware that we're stuck with JS in the browser for a while...

Re: Changing times for web developers

#62

Post by jameswyse »

mmaunder wrote: post #9

Agree with half, but don't worry about: JS MVC frameworks: MVC in JS is almost always overkill. HTML5: Most of the web doesn't have support for it yet. Optimization: Sure, but don't preoptimize so rather go looking for the tools once your app tells you it's slow. Also minified JS is great to save a tiny bit of bandwidth and obfuscate, but damn it's a pain to debug your live site.

> "JS MVC frameworks: MVC in JS is almost always overkill."

This depends entirely on what you're making. JS frameworks like AngularJS really ease the pain of building rich, interactive web apps.

> "HTML5: Most of the web doesn't have support for it yet."

HTML5 is a moving target, modules are now versioned separately so there is no true/false for support. The fact is you can use a lot of the really useful changes so far in the most used modern browsers and there's polyfills/shivs to help IE9 and below. Now that we're all moving to auto-updating browsers we should see a much faster rollout of new features than we have in the past.

> "Optimization: go looking for the tools once your app tells you it's slow"

If you can solve a problem before it happens then you should do it, it should be part of your deployment process. If you're just making simple sites then apps like CodeKit can take care of everything for you.

> "damn it's a pain to debug your live site." So don't try to debug a live site, that's silly!

Re: Changing times for web developers

#63

Post by skrebbel »

johnyzee wrote: post #54

This is against the grain, but it is obvious to me that the way forward for web development is to rise above Javascript and simple DOM mangling, which is what most of these popular tools assist with. Javascript does not scale complexity and manipulating DOM elements directly is both error-prone and a lousy programming paradigm. We need something in between that offers a sane development model and deals with the compl…

I feel you, but so far I haven't seen any such solution that isn't full of leaky abstractions. As far as I've come to understand, GWT is no exception.

What's the point of a high level powerful tool if you need to understand the underlying technologies and the transformations to it well in order to use it?

Re: Changing times for web developers

#65

Post by tterrace »

blablabla123 wrote: post #39
se85 wrote: post #34

This reads to me like a "6 steps to becoming a better web developer" article because the author completely fails to talk about anything "new".

Being familiar with 5 MVC frameworks is required to be considered as web developer? ;) Some people also don't like web pages stuffed to the limit with JS code, so I wonder whether everybody agrees that you should take for every task a specialized library. (Responsive framework, modernizr, ...)

That's what I stopped on... FIVE javascript MVC frameworks? Maybe five WEB frameworks for the top languages, but knowing five JS MVC frameworks seems like a complete waste.

Re: Changing times for web developers

#66

Post by smharris65 »

edanm wrote: post #15

Does anyone have any recommendations for good REST books? For example, the book cited in the article - is it good? I understand the basics of REST, but I want to get a deeper understanding. Also, I still regularly encounter situations where I'm not sure what the "best" thing to do is (collections of items, linked items, etc. - how to represent this with REST?).

Try the REST cookbook:

http://www.amazon.com/RESTful-Web-Services-Cookbook-Scalabil...

Re: Changing times for web developers

#67

Post by pcl »

It's a good list. One nit:

> websites are expected to work in different form factors by default

Ironically, I found the font size of the article to be on the small side when browsing on my iPhone.

Re: Changing times for web developers

#68

Post by wildranter »

Osmose wrote: post #59
wildranter wrote: post #52

The web is a mess. Where's the news in that? Code once and run in all platforms is pretty much a myth no matter the framework you use, including the web ecosystem. I've lost count of how many times I wished we could run in the browser a decent language like python or ruby. Or describe the data of documents in something more meaningful like JSON instead of HTML. And then there's the DOM, CCSS, and all the browser spec…

I'm confused about the JSON > HTML part of your comment. Independent of which one is better overall, wouldn't HTML be more meaningful than JSON because it has semantics attached to tags?

You're right, I didn't go far enough to make myself clear on that point. The semantics of HTML tags could be pretty easily covered by reserved words for keys, and something like markdown for text formatting.

From that we'd get all the benefits of a cleaner syntax, such as a saner grammar which could lead to cleaner APIs, less bugs, less maintenance, etc.

Re: Changing times for web developers

#69

Post by jarek-foksa »

johnyzee wrote: post #54

This is against the grain, but it is obvious to me that the way forward for web development is to rise above Javascript and simple DOM mangling, which is what most of these popular tools assist with. Javascript does not scale complexity and manipulating DOM elements directly is both error-prone and a lousy programming paradigm. We need something in between that offers a sane development model and deals with the compl…

Building UI libraries on top of canvas feels like reinventing the weel, HTML/SVG/CSS already provide you advanced APIs for accessability, text layout, theming and drawing. All you really need is a tiny abstraction layer.

Re: Changing times for web developers

#70

Post by krmmalik »

mgkimsal wrote: post #57
PommeDeTerre wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going based on the hundreds of web developers I've interviewed over the past few years. These include people with no formal training, through to people with a decade or more of experience. While I don't specifically ask for experience with jQuery in job postings, there have only been a small handful of those candidates who have never used it. But even they have often just focused on using YUI, MooTools, Dojo, or…

The author explicitly called out .NET developers (" and I see a lot of web developers still lagging behind especially in the .NET world.") So do I. A trip to my local .net user group last month had presenter going over ASP.NET MVC v4 and some of the reactions and comments were... hard to believe. I'm not saying all .NET devs are behind the times, but there seems to be a disproportionate amount of them, based on my ow…

Agreed. The problem always seems more pronounced when it comes .Net. In my own observation, it seems to be a culture/mindset that gets adopted, and I have to say, I feel it's largely driven by Microsoft.

This whole idea of developing everything yourself, not paying as much attention to subtleties in UI and so on. If you notice most .Net blogs, they're mostly behind the times when it comes to this stuff.

It's like when Ruby on Rails came out, there seemed to be this notion that because something was developed in Ruby, that was the reason why it was "pretty", yet it just happened a culture driven by 37Signals and so the result was that a large portion of Ruby work was decent looking.

In the same vain, I feel Microsoft has set a particular culture in motion when it comes .Net.

Disclaimer: I realise these are generalisations and i may have a skewed view, but these have been my observations for the last several years.

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