I've been a web developer for 15 years. The modern web is kind of a hack.
The web was originally designed to share and link static documents. That's it. And while we've added many things to it, the foundation remains the same. The fact it's grown this much is a testament to the flexibility in its basic design. I'd argue we're pushing its boundaries.
Think about it this way. We're making complex, stateful, dynamic applications on top of text documents. We're programmatically generating these text documents and/or altering their representation in a client application. It breaks very easily and is challenging to optimize.
Before web development I spent 10 years writing traditional client/server applications. Believe me, it had its headaches and drawbacks, but the systems I worked with were built for that purpose, were very efficient, and were relatively simple to debug.
The web wins because it has the best possible distribution model. Everyone already has the necessary client installed. Hopefully we can continue to adapt it more effectively with new standards.
I've been a web developer for 15 years. The modern web is kind of a hack.
The web was originally designed to share and link static documents. That's it. And while we've added many things to it, the foundation remains the same. The fact it's grown this much is a testament to the flexibility in its basic design. I'd argue we're pushing its boundaries.
Think about it this way. We're making complex, stateful, dynamic applications on top of text documents. We're programmatically generating these text documents and/or altering their representation in a client application. It breaks very easily and is challenging to optimize.
Before web development I spent 10 years writing traditional client/server applications. Believe me, it had its headaches and drawbacks, but the systems I worked with were built for that purpose, were very efficient, and were relatively simple to debug.
The web wins because it has the best possible distribution model. Everyone already has the necessary client installed. Hopefully we can continue to adapt it more effectively with new standards.
This pretty much sums everything up. In all my time here on DEV, this is probably the most insightful comment I have ever read.