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Hello all:

Here on devBlog, my purpose is to talk about different issues involved with web development in particular and application development in general. My work as a programmer and IT consultant has me involved with a lot of different issues concerning web development and I have started this space to be able to write essays/short comments on the salient issues of the day for me and for the web development community.

I come to this as a developer who has worked a lot with Active Server Pages, and a little bit so far with PHP. Along the way, I have discovered that ASP isn't all that-- for a number of reasons. But I find myself more and more having to deal with issues involving plain old HTML and JavaScript, and trying to take my game to the next level. It seems the only way to do that is to move away from ASP and on to another scripting language like PHP, and to solidify my HTML and JavaScript skills. I have about 2 1/2 years of experience in programming altogether. I came to it as a second career, after having worked in retailing for 14 years.

I see PHP, open source software, and public web standards as the way to go for the future. It doesn't seem like the developer community (or the business community, for that matter) has really embraced either .NET or J2EE in a big way as an application framework. J2EE might make sense for larger enterprises, but hasn't otherwise caught on. It's just too damn complicated. .NET is a reprise of J2EE, but it doesn't seem all that much easier to work with. Microsoft is banking on it as the future basis for Windows, so the sheer momentum of Windows upgrades might see it emerge as the dominant framework for Windows applications. Curiously enough, the place where both frameworks have seen the most success so far is in the area of web programming: Java Server Pages and ASP.NET have seen the most adoption. Desktop and non-web server applications have lagged. The reason? Desktop and non-web server apps require the installation of additional libraries aside from the operating system to run: the .NET Framework for .NET or the JRE for Java. Web scripting requires nothing on the client side but a web browser. Why make it any harder on your users?

Since there is a lot of potential for more development on the internet, there is a lot to talk about: developing for mobile devices, browser rendering of HTML, Javascript, and CSS; RSS and RDF; web services and service oriented architecture; the coming ubiquity of XML; and much more. I welcome your comments-- the only requirement is that you be a registered member of blogger.com

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