I haven't done much web development now for 7 years. I did a large-ish project at work using AxKit (probably one of the highest traffic mod_perl applications in existance, doing about 200 million transactions/day) about 4 or 5 years ago, but I don't really count that as it didn't expand my knowledge of web technology in any way.
I keep reading about new web "stuff" - Rails, Django, Seaside, etc. None of it really interests me all that much because frankly the core of the web doesn't appear to have changed a whole lot to me - you do a request and you serve a response. But maybe I'm missing something.
Email stuff of course still interests me because it's my day job. What's fascinating about my day job is that it's entirely built around people breaking the system and doing "weird" things, and me having to fix stuff. The most recent example was spammers sending QP encoded emails with high bit characters. That broke my QP decoding routines, but it also is a 100% spam indicator.
So is what is actually new and interesting that I should be looking into right now to keep my skills honed? When the web was dying (i.e. around 2000) it was XML, and learning and working with that served me well. What is interesting now?
Re:Mostly client-side
ask on 2008-01-05T07:58:27
Yeah, client-side stuff. On the server side a lot of the talk is about frameworks and tools that, IMO, have way too much magic. I don't think they help all that much getting your work done - as you said, the basic paradigm is still the same. I haven't tried it, but with Jifty they are trying to change that a little, but I'm not sure it's sane to try hiding or abstracting the reality of how HTTP works that much...
Anyway,
You used XML to push data around in your back-end with AxKit -- now you use JSON to push data to the client (and back).
Javascript is relatively easy to learn, but you'll be spending all sorts of time learning the APIs of the browsers and then of all the Javascript libraries people put on top to avoid dealing with the browser quirks more than necessary.
For internal applications ExtJS is Really Excellent. For a highly QA'ed, well documented "outside facing" library the YUI JS is great.
- ask
Re:Mostly client-side
Aristotle on 2008-01-05T08:45:55
Personally I like Catalyst better, and like Catalyst, because it gets away with quite little magic (unlike Jifty), but it has neat provisions to make your code very, very non-repetitive. Dispatch-type Chained is the bomb; it has helped clean up my code (that was already reasonably well-structured) to a similar extent as going from procedural to object-oriented in a GUI app (and I don’t mean messy procedural code).
Oh wait, you already wrote one (or two) of those IIRC
