After sitting down and creating a javascript client, I have to say – this really sucks. I guess moving to a heavier client tier is a natural progression of web development. Back in 1996 or so when I was still in grade school, I started messing around with HTML and basic CGI scripts for creating dynamic web pages. About 2 years later, MySQL became really popular and the first database generated web sites started to appear. The big argument back then was whether application logic should be done in the database end or in the application tier. The languages and platforms I was aware of in the open source world were Perl and PHP3 – both were equally terrible web development tools. These weren’t the only open source tools out there at the time, rather quite the opposite. There was a huge plethora of different web platforms out there. Some still exist but still obscure – others just obscure. Let’s just say things were weird because everyone was still trying to figure out the best way to develop web front ends. For example, it wasn’t unheard of to hear SQL being used to generate HTML.

After PHP4 came out, there was an explosion in web development around the PHP, MySQL, and Apache application stack. About this time, most of the dynamic page generation got moved to the application tier.  Fast forward about 6 years later to the present, we’re seeing more of the page generation executed in the web browser using Javascript or some other platform built into the browser. There are numerous advantages that can be gained by moving page generation to the client: lower load on the servers, improved visual enhancements, and faster execution speed. However, developing interfaces in javascript still feels immature. To me, client side development in javascript is about equivalent to what PHP4 was back in 2001 – it does the job but has a lot of room for improvement.

This doesn’t mean the javascript engines found in IE and Firefox aren’t mature, its actually quite the opposite. Since Javascript has been incorporated in the browser since the 1990s, the engine is very mature and stable. It’s just new requirements and forms of usage for javascript has changed since its original inception, hence why I think the current implementation seems incomplete. By incomplete, I mean issues such as browser compatibility, the occasional memory leak, and I still think development tools have room for improvement, like code completion and debugging.

The current application I’m working on uses the ExtJs framework for generating the Admin UI and Django as the middle tier for parsing requests between the client and the database. So far, the combination is working well.