Web development future
As you may already know I work as a web developer. This means I encounter a lot of (X)HTML, PHP and JavaScript. There is no doubt that those are the most widely used tools for small/medium websites as well as there is no doubt that with all the new trends, with the increasing will to build the "Web 2.0" the developmet becms harder and harder. There is a tremendous amount of ways to implement things, a huge number of frameworks out there than say "Hey, use me! I am the best!". Obviously, this is very stressful for the developer. And what is more stressing is the complexity of the code.
Remember how you used to write those small pure HTML pages without caring about whether it passes the validity tests? Remeber how you didn't care about Mozilla, Opera and Safari? You only had to make sure that this will work in IE and put a small text on the front page - "This site was made for IE6".
After that came PHP, which was overwhelming. It is a great tool designed to make scripting pages with ease. Then came databases and object-oriented paradigms. That is the time when I first started to feel frustrated. The code did not fit into my head anymore. I had to review the classes I have, the functions that they have, members, deal with connections and other crap.
And the latest thing - AJAX. This thing has been terrorising every single web developer. When I hear AJAX I always have two conflicting feelings - it is cool and it is very unpleasant to make it happen. I mean JavaScript was so simple (and mostly unnecessary) until AJAX hit the internet (and Web 2.0, of course). All you did was getElementById and validate forms with it sometimes.
Where am I going with this? Well... It is simple. At the moment the whole web development process with HTML/PHP/JS is quite complicated if you want to make something exceptional. As I work I keep seeing that I am performing repeating actions now and then. And I think that now it is time to make something new. A new way, a new tool, tailored for the specific needs of the web developer community. I will be not surprised if it will be something ASP.NET-like. Let it be. It is time to either dramatically improve the web development tools we have now or to create a new all-in-one tool that takes the concepts of HTML, PHP and JS/AJAX together and puts them into a universal form.
Web development tools I use and recommend
Ok, not being original here, but still... a web developer's blog is never complete without this. Maybe somebody will find at least something useful here. So here goes:
Tasks
- slicing designs into images and cobining it to (X)HTML/CSS
- script writing (PHP / JavaScript)
- debugging
- testing IE compatibility
- quick editing
- database handling
- OS: Microsoft Windows
- others
ORM for PHP – Doctrine
I have been always dreaming about some magical component for PHP developers that would free us from the pain of handling databses. And I have mostly seen useless wrappers for native database functions of PHP. Those always tried to claim that the will make it all better. No luck. Until recently (well, a bit more than recently) I looked into a thing called ORM (Object-relational mapping). Specifically - an ORM for PHP called Doctrine.