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The New Emperors Clothes - Abuse of Web Technology

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13 Oct 2017CPOL4 min read 117.7K   1   35   86
Why JavaScript/JQuery/HTML/CSS/DOM is creating an awful mess

Introduction

The inspiration for this blog post was the following set of error messages displayed on an arrivals screen at Brighton, England railway station on Sunday, 29th January.

The Inspiration for this Article

Image 1

A Recipe for Chaos

What this shows is a broken arrivals computer system which has been completely over, and badly, engineered for the purpose of displaying information about the arrivals of buses to carry train passengers.

The designers/developers have chosen to build a browser based system with client-side JavaScript pulling data asynchronously from a web service. Nothing wrong with that in principal, but for a non-interactive display-only, highly available message board system? I think not, as clearly demonstrated.

The problems shown here are typical and are spreading like wild fire. People, including customers, project managers, inexperienced technical people, and transport staff, all make the same mistake. They think that the web is all about the browser.

This mistaken belief is responsible for the rise (and soon fall) of browser oriented technology, where software houses, designers and developers around the globe, have resorted to breaking all the rules of industrial strength software development in the belief that browser technologies are current 'best-practice'.

What are these current technologies that are not industrial strength?

Separation of Concerns: Client-Side Script and Web Services

Whilst separating display logic from business logic is generally a good principle of software engineering, it is almost impossible to do using the current technologies favoured by the web software development industry today. Client-side code is being implemented in JavaScript and is increasingly gaining more and more business logic because changing JavaScript is easier that redesigning complex web services. This makes for very unreliable and unmaintainable software, and let us not forget that this business logic is available for all to see.

And what of the display logic? A mixture of HTML, CSS and JQuery is creating code which is utterly unmaintainable and unmanageable, throw in the mechanism of dealing with the enormous range of web service protocols, document object models (DOM), etc. and you have a classic spaghetti dish. This is far from the ideal and history teaches us much about what happens when this is the case.

Lowest Common Denominator Web Service Protocols

We have gone from WSDL and ASMX to REST and WCF. XML is being replaced with JSON because it is smaller in size and gets around some browser string problems, but you have to use JSONP to get around many other limitations. So, we are now passing complex data as strings! We get no benefit from sharing classes or strongly typed objects. Another recipe for disaster.

Proprietary Security Protocols

Each browser/web server combination works differently with different security protocols, and oAuth is hard to do properly. You need some good technology on the back end and a good CRM system to manage developer API keys, etc. Web security is always evolving and requires a lot of knowledge, money and time to master. Many projects simply do not have the budget or experienced staff, so instead developers are implementing their own proprietary security mechanisms, resulting in systems which are very fragile and easily hackable.

Development and Maintenance Tool Immaturity

For almost thirty years, we have had highly graphical software development tools with more recently intellisense, edit-and-continue, source code analysis tools, memory checkers, garbage collectors, etc. We get almost none of this with JavaScript, DOM and JQuery. Developing in these client-side web frameworks is like stepping back in time to a prehistoric age of software development.

Script-Kiddie Mentality and Inexperience

Many of the people writing this client-side JavaScript/JQuery/HTML/CSS are young, cheap and inexperienced. They have no concept of industrial strength software design. They do not know or care about reliability or maintenance because they'll be off onto the next job or mountain long before their code catastrophically breaks leaving us with the debris. Good luck to the people who have to fix it under enormous pressure from paying customers, irate investors and frustrated management.

Too Much Focus on Web Design at the Expense of Robustness and Reliability

If it looks good, it must be good eh? Wrong! Almost all web designers know absolutely nothing about complex business processes and the provision of reliable data to service those essential business activities. Project managers and customers are easily captivated by something which looks sexy. Web designers know this and use it as a shield to hide the mess that lies beneath the surface.

There are of course many more, but this is a blog-post not a book.

In summary, the new emperors clothes do not fit, are badly designed and will be torn to shreds as more and more people will be affected by this madness. Anyone contemplating building line of business (LoB) or safety (or transport) critical web applications using these technologies should really think again, to put it mildly.

Update: October 2017

The madness continues:

Image 2

History

  • Monday, 30th January, 2012: First posted on TriSys' blog
  • Friday 13th October, 2017: Updated

License

This article, along with any associated source code and files, is licensed under The Code Project Open License (CPOL)


Written By
Chief Technology Officer TriSys Business Software
United Kingdom United Kingdom
Software developer

Comments and Discussions

 
QuestionMaybe but maybe not Pin
Peter Lange17-Oct-17 13:28
Peter Lange17-Oct-17 13:28 
PraiseGreat article Pin
Electroduck17-Oct-17 12:10
Electroduck17-Oct-17 12:10 
SuggestionIs the web application development battle lost for programmers? Pin
dimpant17-Oct-17 10:59
dimpant17-Oct-17 10:59 
QuestionYep. Solid disciplined development has been throw out the window. Pin
kburgoyne117-Oct-17 7:14
kburgoyne117-Oct-17 7:14 
AnswerRe: Yep. Solid disciplined development has been throw out the window. Pin
OriginalGriff17-Oct-17 7:18
mveOriginalGriff17-Oct-17 7:18 
QuestionExcellent but not just web based Pin
Member 1041399616-Oct-17 21:55
Member 1041399616-Oct-17 21:55 
QuestionSo, what would you do? Pin
JohnSourvinos16-Oct-17 18:39
JohnSourvinos16-Oct-17 18:39 
QuestionIt's worse than that ... Pin
Member 239204116-Oct-17 4:57
Member 239204116-Oct-17 4:57 
AnswerRe: It's worse than that ... Pin
Peter Lange17-Oct-17 13:31
Peter Lange17-Oct-17 13:31 
QuestionCongrats Pin
McChubby00713-Oct-17 2:29
McChubby00713-Oct-17 2:29 
QuestionAbsolutely right Pin
Syedur Rahaman6-Mar-13 20:00
Syedur Rahaman6-Mar-13 20:00 
GeneralMy vote of 5 Pin
jawed.ace4-Mar-13 0:41
jawed.ace4-Mar-13 0:41 
GeneralMy vote of 5 Pin
Nick Polyak20-Oct-12 16:12
mvaNick Polyak20-Oct-12 16:12 
GeneralMy vote of 5 Pin
Kamran Saeedi10-May-12 0:10
Kamran Saeedi10-May-12 0:10 
GeneralMy vote of 5 Pin
2374117-Mar-12 17:59
2374117-Mar-12 17:59 
GeneralRe: My vote of 5 Pin
Peter Shaw17-Oct-17 2:14
professionalPeter Shaw17-Oct-17 2:14 
GeneralMy vote of 5 Pin
fi396820-Feb-12 23:11
fi396820-Feb-12 23:11 
GeneralMy vote of 5 Pin
Grump9-Feb-12 1:13
Grump9-Feb-12 1:13 
QuestionI see your point, but ... Pin
SGarratt8-Feb-12 10:56
SGarratt8-Feb-12 10:56 
AnswerRe: I see your point, but ... Pin
Garry Lowther8-Feb-12 23:48
Garry Lowther8-Feb-12 23:48 
GeneralRe: I see your point, but ... Pin
gstolarov11-Feb-12 15:06
gstolarov11-Feb-12 15:06 
GeneralRe: I see your point, but ... Pin
Dan Randolph14-Apr-12 6:50
Dan Randolph14-Apr-12 6:50 
QuestionSpot On! Pin
TheDuck618-Feb-12 9:44
TheDuck618-Feb-12 9:44 
AnswerRe: Spot On! Pin
Garry Lowther8-Feb-12 23:49
Garry Lowther8-Feb-12 23:49 
QuestionIt is real Pin
Suchi Banerjee, Pune6-Feb-12 13:28
Suchi Banerjee, Pune6-Feb-12 13:28 

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