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an analogy... Man, writing poetry is hard. It takes me 2-3 weeks to write a haiku and months to write a sonnet. Language doesn't matter for writing code any m

by keefe 17y ago

an analogy... Man, writing poetry is hard. It takes me 2-3 weeks to write a haiku and months to write a sonnet. Language doesn't matter for writing code any more than it does for writing poetry. You need to specify a lot more details before discussing whether 80-120 hours is really fast or really slow for a given project. How many screens, 10 or 200? What kind of test coverage - none or 100% unit tested? How does it have to scale? What level of security? Do you have a style template or do you have to write one? I work with java too. You can generate a simple crud app extremely quickly if you know what you're doing and which libraries to use.

akrymski 17y ago
true, but if you compare the same simple crud app to a desktop equivalent - which is easier? to get even the simple web app to the stage that it runs consistently on all the different browsers out there is a bigger task. say you want to list the rows from your db: do you use a table? or divs? lots of ways to layout these in html. then you need to write some CSS, cause there's no default look and feel provided out of the box. then you'll probably need to write some javascript to validate fields before user can submit a form (or alternatively come up with error-handling on the server-side and then write some html to display these appropriately). so many different technologies involved. IMO a programmer shouldn't be expected to know java, css, xhtml, javascript - just to get a crud app running. I've been developing web apps for many years and to this day some css layout issue takes me hours to solve to get IE6 to work properly. That's where time is wasted, not on the crud db access stuff...
- keefe 17y ago
  Forget IE6, unless you have an client that demands it. I've only ever seen that once and it was years ago. > java, css, xhtml, javascript lol well that's the stack I've been working for 10 years so perhaps I am biased. >that it runs consistently on all the different browsers out there is a bigger task. This is not much of an issue anymore. jQuery and GWT do well enough. >say you want to list the rows from your db: do you use a table? Yes, you use a table. You're displaying tabular data. You should also be thinking about data models, not rows in a table. >then you need to write some CSS, cause there's no default look and feel provided out of the box Lookup some templates and read w3schools to make it functional then get a designer involved. That problem doesn't go away using some other server language.
  - akrymski 17y ago
    I'm not saying it's impossible, it's just a lot harder than a desktop-app, because there isn't a GUI toolkit with standard look & feel, functionality, and API. Web designers ultimately write one from scratch every time they need to create a new web app. IMO that's wrong. GWT is the only proper GUI toolkit I know, and it truly borrows lots from desktop APIs. But not everyone wants a 100% JS web page, some people still care about SEO.

by keefe 17y ago

akrymski 17y ago

true, but if you compare the same simple crud app to a desktop equivalent - which is easier? to get even the simple web app to the stage that it runs consistently on all the different browsers out there is a bigger task. say you want to list the rows from your db: do you use a table? or divs? lots of ways to layout these in html. then you need to write some CSS, cause there's no default look and feel provided out of the box. then you'll probably need to write some javascript to validate fields before user can submit a form (or alternatively come up with error-handling on the server-side and then write some html to display these appropriately). so many different technologies involved. IMO a programmer shouldn't be expected to know java, css, xhtml, javascript - just to get a crud app running. I've been developing web apps for many years and to this day some css layout issue takes me hours to solve to get IE6 to work properly. That's where time is wasted, not on the crud db access stuff...

keefe 17y ago
Forget IE6, unless you have an client that demands it. I've only ever seen that once and it was years ago. > java, css, xhtml, javascript lol well that's the stack I've been working for 10 years so perhaps I am biased. >that it runs consistently on all the different browsers out there is a bigger task. This is not much of an issue anymore. jQuery and GWT do well enough. >say you want to list the rows from your db: do you use a table? Yes, you use a table. You're displaying tabular data. You should also be thinking about data models, not rows in a table. >then you need to write some CSS, cause there's no default look and feel provided out of the box Lookup some templates and read w3schools to make it functional then get a designer involved. That problem doesn't go away using some other server language.
- akrymski 17y ago
  I'm not saying it's impossible, it's just a lot harder than a desktop-app, because there isn't a GUI toolkit with standard look & feel, functionality, and API. Web designers ultimately write one from scratch every time they need to create a new web app. IMO that's wrong. GWT is the only proper GUI toolkit I know, and it truly borrows lots from desktop APIs. But not everyone wants a 100% JS web page, some people still care about SEO.