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What's old is new again

Tuesday, 30 July 2024

Dev models for Web Applications

In my LONG (30 year) history of building web applications there have been many ways to build a web app.

  1. Pure HTML 1990-> - the very first (if you ignore BBS / text based systems) mechanism for building web apps was Plain Old HTML. Building a web page, list a bunch of products and provide a mail in address, phone number or even email to send orders to. This had a few advantages and (many) disadvantages.
  • Firstly it was simple; you just gave a list of a bunch of products, the user selected whatever they wanted then sent a cheque to the address and waited to get your goods
  • It rendered quickly (important in those days as most people accessed the web over modems, you're talking kilobytes per second).
  • It was fairly straightforward to update. You'd just update the HTML file and upload it to whatever server you were using (using FTP most commonly)
  • However it was SLOW...the mail service ain't quick, cheques are slow to cash etc...
  1. CGI 1993-> - arguably the first 'active' technology used for the web. You would use either C (the first language I used) or something like Perl to generate HTML content

  • You finally got to use the beginnings of the 'modern' web, these would use a variety of 'data' formats to hold content and latterly early databases to allow the level of interaction comparable to 'modern' applications.

  • They were complex to code and update. These were CODE, while latterly there were templated languages used to output HTML the still weren't simple.

  • No real debugging.

  • In the early days while you could accept credit cards these transactions were relatively insecure and the early payment gateways were still a bit of a wild-west.

  1. The 'template' languages (~1995->). The likes of PHP, ColdFusion and yes ASP (no .net!) were the start of allowing 'Rapid Development' for web applications.
  • They were relatively quick to update (still mostly using FTP)
  • By this time SSL had become widely adopted for e-commerce sites so you finally were able to be reasonably safe entering payment details online.
  • Databases had started to mature so it was now possible to have a 'proper' database system to handle product data, customer data etc.
  • It fueled the first 'dotcom boom' - MANY new websites and stores popped up, many failed (MOST really by the early 2000s) it was a bit of a wild west.
  1. The modern era (2001->). Following this first rush of ecommerce excitement more 'mature' web programming frameworks started to appear. These allowed the use of more established patterns and approaches.
  • MVC - the Model-View-Controller pattern. This was really a way of organising code allowing the separation of responsibilities into cogent segments of application design. My first experience of this was back in the days of J2EE & JSP.
  • RAD - Rapid Application Development. As the name suggests this was focused on 'getting stuff working' quickly. This was the approach followed in ASP.NET (form 1999->) with the WebForms framework.
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