The New Road

Web programming inverted

If you haven't noticed there is a new Internet boom that is just starting to show it's first effects. People in the industry are calling it Web 2.0 and banner sites include YouTube, Flikr, Google Maps, gmail, digg, and a bunch of others. It's a two pronged thing, first there is a revolution going on in social software. Poeple are using the web as a way to collaborate on a very informal way.

The other prong is technical, the newer browsers, like Firefox, are designed to be dynamic. Browsers can now request more data from the server without having to navigate the user to another page. So you can explore your web material, like emails, without having to deal with lots of flicker and page loads. This technology has been dubbed Ajax, and it's a combination of HTML, CSS and Javascript.

I've been through both of the booms. During the first boom the 'back-end guys' who wrote the database code, and the business logic, were the kings of the road. In fact, the last thing someone wanted to be labeled was a 'front-end guy' because it meant a cut in salary and having to deal with that silly browser stuff. Of course, I love the 'front-end' stuff and I have since I got into the game.

Now with the second boom the browser is in the forefront. And the engineers who spent a lot of time learning how to code Javascript, DHTML and CSS well are the kings of the road. In fact what's worse for the back-end guys is that the nature of programming for the browser, dynamic evaluation, prototypes, slots based languages, style selectors, are all a foreign mumbo-jumbo. It bears little resemblence to the Java that they learned in college, regardless of the unforunate naming 'Javascript'.

Another exciting trend is the comeback of dynamic languages on the server side, particularly the growing excitement around Ruby on Rails. These dynamic frameworks leave dinosaurs like J2EE in the dust. Actually, J2EE was always in the dust. The only change is that more engineers are starting to look for alternative frameworks in order to be productive.

Hey, wait a second, I should be blogging this over on the O'Reilly blog... Anyway, I find all this inversion fun because my core skill set is back on top again. Woo hoo!