Pain and Glory from the Trenches of the IT World

Earlier this week I had a very surprising and unexpected Haskell encounter! It started when a fairly large furniture shop in the area called me in to do some work on some of their intranet software.

They wanted some functionality added to their existing Web-based purchasing system. They’d mentioned that it was CGI-based, so I was thinking it was comprised of Perl or Python scripts. However, I was quite wrong! After getting access to the source code of their CGI scripts, I noticed immediately that they were all written in Haskell.

Scott Rosenberg recently wrote about how it appears to take an AJAX-based Web application about five years to mature. The examples he gives include the new Yahoo! Mail interface, as well as the new Bloglines design. But I don’t think he’s looking far enough into the situation.

Several days back I wrote about Parrot, specifically the doubts I have that it will ever be suitable for production use. A link to my article was submitted to Reddit, and it generated some discussion. From that discussion, there is one comment in particular that I would like to respond to.

Based on this article, it sounds to me like Douglas Crockford, of JSON fame, has realized the pathetic state of Web-based application development. It was quite refreshing to see an architect at a major Web firm (Yahoo!, in this case) point out the numerous and obvious flaws when using Java applets, JavaScript, XML, CSS, HTML, and AJAX for application development.

I’m a staunch supporter of putting old, but working, computers to good use again. Personally, I have repurposed numerous systems back into production after they were deemed to be too old, and replaced with newer hardware. One of my favourite tools for enabling this is NetBSD. As described on the NetBSD Web site, “NetBSD is a free, secure, and highly portable Unix-like Open Source operating system available for many platforms, from large-scale server systems to powerful desktop systems to handheld and embedded devices.”

Today, thanks to this article, I saw a very telling diagram giving an overview of the “Mozilla Platform”. Before you read on, I encourage you to study the diagram for a few moments.

Earlier today I witnessed the wasteful nature of pointless JavaScript effects first-hand at the Blogger main page. The effect in question is visible under the “BLOGS UPDATED AT …” text immediately under the Blogger logo. In short, the effect involves the title of a recently-updated blog fading away every second or so, to be replaced with the title of another blog. So as can clearly be seen, it’s not essential in any way. It’s completely cosmetic, although it doesn’t even look particularly good.

Today I read this prediction that mobile phone game developers will start to create JavaScript-based games, rather than using J2ME. This is partially due to the iPhone, but also because of Motorola’s MOTOMAGX.

I have to say, this is quite unfortunate. JavaScript-based games running in the Web browser have proven, in my experience, to be quite terrible. This is something that I have written about recently. First was my terrible experience trying to play Brickslayer, a JavaScript-based Breakout clone. The I had yet another pathetic experience playing a JavaScript and SVG-based Space Invaders clone.

Luke Plant has been working on a Haskell-based blogging application for a while now, and describing his progress. I was dismayed to read today that he’s giving up!

One of his main complaints was with regards to the poor state of the available Haskell database interfacing libraries. He does mention Takusen, which a colleague of mine has been using for a personal project of his own. But Takusen doesn’t appear useful to Luke, due to a lack of a proper MySQL backend.

I was just reading an article about the future of CSS. A main focus of the article is on the extremely poor layout capabilities of CSS. One such paragraph from the article goes a long way towards showing the futility of AJAX development today: CSS is great for simple web style. CSS is awful for layout. Rich Ajax apps need layout. You spend the majority of your time trying to get CSS working correctly!