Web development is not broken, it is just non-trivial; you need to think at different levels of abstraction: server-side, client-side, database, etc., and there

Web development is not broken, it is just non-trivial; you need to think at different levels of abstraction: server-side, client-side, database, etc., and there are usually different technologies for each. But web-based software is taking over the world; empirically it is not broken, it is very very successful. And if you want to imagine some magical technology that solves these problems, you are probably falling for the silver bullet fallacy - anything that is advanced enough to solve complex problems (which web software now does) needs to be sufficiently complex to solve those problems. And any abstraction layer is likely to suffer from leaky abstractions (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LeakyAbstractions.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LeakyAbstractions.htm...) That's not to say that improvements can't be made (Rails is one example that aims to make the web development process more coherent and consistent), but fundamentally (and empirically) it works.