Entries tagged “web development”

As part of my continuing quest to create as many posts as possible with as little original content as possible, let's take another look at my revisitation of my own earlier post on web dev trends for 2006. This time, it's in the form of an interview on devpapers.com:

Q: With the rise of code generators and powerful application developer tools, it seems we are all developers now. What do you think of that approach?

A:I think the democratization of tools is almost always a good thing.

The best, least predictable innovations often come from people outside a discipline. And people who have a really unique contribution to make will never be threatened by the masses of amateurs who are just trying to scratch an itch.

There's some other good questions in the article, including "[W]hat do you think you would have said differently if you were to predict web development trends for the next 5 years?". I'll apologize in advance for all the horrible ad cruft on that site, though I don't have any control over that. If I can find a cleaner link to the article, I'll post that.

A little over a year ago, I wrote a post called Web Development Trends for 2006. It was designed to be a forward-thinking view, not just at what technologies would be hot this year, but which ones would be the most valuable addition to the toolkit of a working web developer.

It's been a year, so it's time to revisit. I'll describe how that particular area has evolved, and whether it was a good call or a bad call to focus on that area of expertise.

• Dampening: Also called damping, I described this as "the softening of a user interface through gradual transition instead of immediate state changes". What was considered fairly new then is pretty much standard practice now. I wasn't explicit about how to take advantage of the opportunity, but it seems today that the hard part isn't creating the effects: Components such as the Prototype framework and the Scriptaculous library simplify the development process. The challenge is in identifying how and when to make good use of the technique. Verdict: Good call. Experts in this area are even more valuable than they were a year ago.

• E4X: As I defined it last year, "[s]mart, sensible handling of XML in Javascript" for users of Firefox or Flash. It's a great, powerful technology, but it just hasn't taken off, particularly because its client platforms still don't include native support in Internet Explorer or Safari. Verdict: Bad call. It's still worth hoping it comes alive in the future.

• JSON: JavaScript Object Notation is the cat's pajamas when it comes to exchanging data in a lightweight manner. I had some concerns that people would see JSON as competing with XML as a format, but they turned out to be unfounded. JSON has taken off for many APIs, including a complete developer center from Yahoo, which covers the JSON APIs available for Yahoo services like del.icio.us, Search, Travel, Answerss and nearly every other Yahoo service. It's also shown up in places like the AOL Pictures API and on Eventful. Our team at Six Apart has used it extensively to power Vox, and Tatsuhiko Miyagawa also built it into his Plagger platform. This one's a gimme. Verdict: Good call. JSON skills are a must-have for serious Ajax hackers.

• Good ole' XHTML and CSS: Okay, I cheated on this one. But it was mostly serving as a reminder that you can't forget the basics. Verdict: Always a good call.

• Buffering: The idea here is that the big gobs of Javascript that power Ajax apps would require accommodations for the time they take to load. Techniques like pipelining and intelligent caching have helped mitigate this need somewhat, but there are still valid concerns about the user experience and performance challenges involved in creating rich applications. Verdict: Still out. Can't hurt to be up to speed here, but it's not a deal-breaker if you aren't an expert yet.

• The Atom API: The potential for building on top of robust API for data storage is enormous. We've seen some fits and starts and progress here, but the Atom API hasn't gotten finalized in the way that feed format did, and that has somewhat affected adoption. On the other hand, we've seen some ringing endorsements: Dewitt Clinton, former principal engineer at Amazon's A9, said, "I’ve found the Atom 1.0 standard to meet the needs of nearly every single problem that I’ve thrown at it." Google's Data APIs for Calendar, Blogger and Base are built on top of the API as well. For general data exchange, the Atom API is strong. For regular posting to blogs, the lack of finalization has meant that Atom will probably show up somewhat later in new tools using blogging APIs, such as Microsoft's Word 2007 and Windows Live Writer, or Adobe's Contribute. Verdict: A (moderately) good call.

• Helping Ruby Grow Up: There's been a lot of progress in this area. A year ago, internationalization and localization on the Rails platform could be painful, but updates to both the core platform and to the applications running on top of it have simplified this work. Best of all, there's a smart, defined path for scalability on Rails applications. As DHH himself recommends, just use LiveJournal's open source infrastructure. memcached is free, recently-updated, and works like crazy. So the immediate need was met by people who saw the value of this opportunity last year, but now there's new issues to tackle. Verdict: Good call.

• Marketing: Another gimme. It never goes out of style, and it's still underrated by most geeks. Learn it, live it, love it. Verdict: Always a good call.

The Bottom Line

So overall, how'd we do? Out of eight predictions, we've got two items that are always a good call, which don't really count as particularly prescient. The verdict is still out on one. One was a bad call, and four were good calls. If you throw out the two that don't count, that's four predictions out of six, with one that could still be valuable in the future. That's a 2/3 chance you would have learned something useful by gambling on those recommendations a year ago.

I'm still working on some new recommendations, but I'm more than willing to hear feedback on my analyses above, especially if you disagree. Thanks to Doug van der Molen for the reminder to revisit.

Curious about what technologies and techniques are going to be popular in the coming months and into the next year? Well, our crack team of editors here at dashes.com (that is to say, me) have assembled a list of up-and-coming trends that you should keep an eye on. Call it vocational education for people building Web 2.0.

Some of the overall areas of focus are integration (as always) and front-end technologies that have highly visible impacts on end user experience. People won't pay for a service or rely on it if it doesn't have a robust back-end infrastructure, but they'll be happy to pay for it if the front-end is attractive and at least seems usable.

Here, then, is a random assortment of new web development trends to be ready for in 2006.

• Dampening:

These technologies go by a lot of names, but in general, dampening is the softening of a user interface through gradual transition instead of immediate state changes. The demand for dampening reflects the front-end focus that is being rediscovered in web applications, but it can require server-side changes in order to enable some effects. The best-marketed example of dampening is the yellow fade technique, but overall, user interface elements will be sliding and collapsing instead of simply disappearing.

Key influences on the user experience here are things like the iPod screen backlight fading out instead of merely shutting off, or soft-close doors on newer automobiles.

• E4X:

This little-known ECMA standard is short for "ECMAscript for XML". That mouthful succinctly describes a powerful concept: Smart, sensible handling of XML in Javascript. Right now, the J and the X in Ajax don't play well together, or at least not as well as they should. E4X promises to smooth that combination, at least in more modern/capable user agents. Support is already present, or will soon be, in both the Flash player and Firefox.

What's the quick synopsis? How 'bout building a form dynamically by doing this:

var html = <html/>;
html.head.title = "Hello, World.";
html.body.form.@name = "hello";
html.body.form.@action = "test.php";
html.body.form.@method = "post";
html.body.form.@onclick = "return foo();";
html.body.form.input[0] = "";
html.body.form.input[0].@name = "Submit";