Yeah, so all these high powered client side jscript libraries and what I consider a homogenous look and feel masquerading as “web 2.0″ (please…) seems to point in one direction, and it is the same direction that most new bodies of effort lead; PowerBuilder is gone and dead while it was once a leading development platform. We are sharing things, but within a codified structure that again, masquerades as web 2.0 but is really just a defacto product of collaborative efforts.
Web 2.0 is a marketing term. What does NOT change to accomodate? Web 2.0 is not important. Advancement in utility is. Social functionality is the pornography of technology; most of what people do on the web is related to personal gratification of some sort, however fleeting and shallow. Do I really think you care to see a picture of my Christmas tree? Of course not. Still, you look. Why? Because you can. And it’s new. It won’t be for long. Neither will the idea of an uncluttered UI with APIs and web services designed to link systems. It’s not 2.0. It’s just what the people get excited about and drives revenue today. Reminds me of IPOs in the late 1990′s.
Please, let’s pay more attention to data and less attention to UI. I know UI gets oohs and aahs but if we are ever able to create a real semantic web that would have to be weaved into development tools, humankind will actually be better off. I will still be able to know that so and so is headed to the party tonight, but ideally I’d also know that the triples involved are being utilized.
Yes it is hard to agree on a singular approach although there is an RDF standard, but soon web development will be BORING and process, data mining, and Systems will be all that is left to push.
There is always faster and bigger. How about better?
Managing efforts towards this end will involve a treaty of sorts (please no mandates yet) and I hope it happens soon. Architectures come and go. They accomodate perceived need. Platforms like CMS Systems are blah at this point. Imagine if Plone had MS or Google $ behind it. It’s just business. We can do better than that. And the sooner we can create a framework that encompasses the majority of what is not custom process or workflow, the sooner we can actually do interesting stuff. It is easy to manage tasks. What is more challenging is the informed identification of tasks. Then, execution. We need to do this.
We need to. For moral and logistic reasons alike.
- Josh Milane
013109 – I decided that I am not sure I agree with everything I said here. I assume no liability for anything in there, and blame all odd comments and loose lines of reasoning on fatigue.
Hey Josh -
I agree with your comments about UI and Web 2.0….eye candy’s nice, but it’s the data that’s important.
Anyway, I’m writing about your PowerBuilder comment. It’s not dead and gone, it’s actually at v11.5, with v12 underway. It may not have the market leadership position it once did, but the market’s changed quite a bit since then. Yet, there are still hundreds of thousands of customers and apps using PowerBuilder….because it works!
Hi Sue,
I know. It is still around, and it still has it’s place. I was writing on the train and wanted to draw attention to how quickly there becomes the standard as opposed to the “specialized”. The good thing is that there is always going to be a need for specialization. The bad news is that what creates the standard is not by any means that which is in the interest of anything besides $.
PS – a PowerBuilder 7 app I wrote is still being used by a government agency locally in the New England area. Still working. This is back when datawindows were hot
Thanks!
J