By Christian Heilmann CHAPTER 3to realize at the first bite that it has no taste whatsoever. Effects are nice
to have but should not be our end goal. They are great to impress Web
developers and other interested parties, but we should spend far more
time asking real users what their objectives are when visiting our sites or
using our apps. Sometimes the simplest solutions are the most beautiful.
STRong founDaTionS beaT a PoSSible fuTuRe aDDiTion
Often we add a lot of code or interfaces to allow for a future that we think will need
them. This future hardly ever comes about. Let’s build for the now.
Probably the biggest cause of bloated solutions is that we overshoot the
mark when it comes to planning the architecture of our Web solutions. The
Web is hot right now and there are not enough Web developers to meet the
demand for products to be built. A lot of developers are needed and many
of them come from more traditional software environments where sys-
tems are built in one way and one way only to scale and be robust. Often
we now shoehorn these approaches into the Web, and claim cultishly that
anything not built on OO (Object-Oriented) principles and with an MVC
approach will never scale and be operable.
Years of Web-built products show, however, that this is not the case. Of
course, a cleaner approach bears the fruit of better, maintainable code, but
not when it comes at the cost of generated front-end interfaces that rely
on JavaScript to work, and create distinct code for different browsers — in
many cases, for different versions of the same browser. What many devel-
opment approaches forget is that a single-page application requires you to
not only write your app, but also replace a lot of functionality done for the
Web by HTTP and the browser, like history-keeping and undo functional-
ity. In essence, you run a thick-client app in a thin-client environment you
cannot control.
A good idea is to think about what you want to achieve before you
reach for the silver bullet of MVC frameworks and switch to what’s touted
as a better language than JavaScript merely to generate JavaScript.