launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Jonathan Lange <jml@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, Nov 1, 2010 at 6:38 PM, Robert Collins
<robert.collins@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Quite an interesting analysis of web frameworks today - well worth
> taking the time to watch.

Subjective summary:

 * Lots of things in web frameworks today are legacy thinking from CGI days.
 * Persistence
   * More than just RDBMS these days => framework must support more
than just RDBMS
   * Cheap RAM => apps can keep whole data set in memory
     * e.g. ITA's Orbitz and LinkedIn both keep their graph db in memory
 * Data processing
   * Instead of faster CPUs, multiple CPUs => support things like mapreduce
     * Side note: multiple processes, not shared memory threads
 * Javascript
   * e.g. Gmail, est 2004 (!)
     * Load all JS first; then send JSON back and forth
     * Improves responsiveness, extensibility
   * Getting easier: browsers, frameworks, better VMs (V8 makes
Smalltalkers happy)
   => Templates will die
     * Content vs Presentation better done w/ HTML vs CSS than data
structures vs HTML
     * JS becomes more like a desktop app
   => Backend hackers have to know more JS
     => Need to get better JS environment for backend hackers (e.g. "Clamato")
   => Much, much more like building a desktop app
   => Instead of appserver translating model into HTML; translating
model into another model (JSON)
     * Need "this is some data and a stub of data that I'm not going
to send you yet"
     * Need "here is a callback for some behavior that's associated
with this data"

Interesting bits from questions:
 * Get more comfortable writing much more JS. That means more tools.
 * Don't know what the answers are. The frameworks that get this will win.
 * Have to choose between static-as-possible SEO and good
highly-interactive UX (but one day Google will figure this out and
save us the choice)
 * a URL isn't really a location of a resource, but a route to get to
an update to a resource => elegant URLs not so important
 * How you design framework influenced by what you expect to be layered on top
 * GWT is probably the only framework tackling this problem