Web 2.0 is a great concept. If you take what I consider to be the seminal, definitive and diffinitive definition of Web 2.0, a key aspect is the coupling of data and processing logic...an extension of object-oriented concept of encapsulated state and behavior.
Other interesting aspects of Web 2.0 are also similar to aspects of the RAD trend in the 1990's Client/Server era. Many of the Web 2.0 vendors are enabling a web version of RAD - a RAD for Web Applications (RAD4WA) or Rapid Web Application Development.
Even though they dropped support of the Mac version of their tool :( , when it comes to Web 2.0 application development I like ActiveGrid. One of the first things you'll notice about AG is that nearly every artifact is represented by some open standard; the rest are open scripting language artifacts or represented by an XSD. Developing a Web application integrating web services and databases is simple. straightforward and quick.
Another brilliant move by AG is their server model. I can only imagine the discusion that lead to their server design: we don't want a cluster model, we want a grid of low-cost, commodity processing nodes (LAMP stack servers) that will provide enterprise scalability, fault-tolerance, etc. The big vendors are spending huge amounts of money to develop grid / utility computing, what will we do? What does nearly everyone have, or at least have access too? Apache Web Server. We'll write a grid module for Apache. Absolutely brilliant: simple and elegant.
Finally, AG lets you use any/all of a myriad of scripting languages and/or plug-in your own. If you are interested in Web 2.0 or developing Web 2.0 applications AG is worth a look.
Back to RAD...
RAD worked well. We were able to offload processing from expensive mainframes onto low-cost PCs and Unix boxes (where the databases lived). For the most part, the RAD solutions were primariliy data presentation and data entry with input validation (sounds familiar to what most commercial web sites provide, no)?
RAD tools and solutions had their issues and limitations too. They worked well for a certain class of applications where the business logic was not overly complex; they didn't have separation of concerns (e.g., MVC) which was invented and lived nearly exclusively in the Smalltalk world, as did much of the design patterns back then. As complexity rose and maintenance cycles accrued they became very brittle and difficult to maintain. Not to mention they were proprietary.
During part of the RAD era, I worked for a Smalltalk vendor named Digitalk, Inc. Unlike most of the RAD tools of the time, our's was based on Smalltalk. The RAD tool was called PARTS - an instance based RAD programming tool. That is, you build your Smalltalk classes as usual and used PARTS to create instances of any of the classes in your image and knit them together into an application. You could even combine instances into a component (called a Part), that you could save in Parts catalogues and reuse in other applications. Very simple and powerful. PARTS, though standalone too, was part of Digitalk's Visual Smalltalk Enterprise - IMHO the best enterprise C/S RAD toolkit available at the time. What Digitalk VSE was to C/S RAD, I see striking similarities to what AG is to Web 2.0.
It remains to be seen if the Web 2.0 application development vendors can provide more than Rapid Web Application Development and deployment tools. I think some can, are and will. I've picked my winner, what say you?
Web 2.0 is RAD for the Web. I hope it goes better this time around!
Disclaimer: I used to work for Digitalk, Inc. and I have a fond nostalgia for their products. I do not work for ActiveGrid nor do I have any business relationship with them. But if you are hiring or planning for an ActiveGrid project, please let me know. We should talk!
No comments:
Post a Comment