Web as a platform, web development gets serious
Posted by Jesse Rodgers on October 22, 2004 at 11:32 AM
UW has an interestingly diverse web culture. In a presentation or two I have suggested that when it comes to conceptualizing the web’s importance, there are Four Corners (stay tuned for more on that) to consider in University web development. But that is just a larger-picture-management-what-should-be-considered sort of thinking. What about site development? What goes into that? What are you developing?
Microsoft doesn’t seem too interested in the web as a publication medium but more as a development platform. In a Buzz article on the WaSP site, Chris Kaminski discusses the web is a platform for developing and deploying applications. He also touches on the impact and where things could be going. To add some fuel to the flames a Google board member recently remarked that he believes things are going to get interesting in the browser world yet again. His comments go some way to supporting the web as a platform idea.
These applications for the web are considered brilliant because: they don’t require certain hardware/software configurations and applications that can be up updated without the user having to do anything. They include things like gmail and Yahoo. Here at UW we have things like myHRinfo,QUEST, UW-ACE, and myWaterloo to name just a few.
Publications and Applications
What makes those web-based applications and web pages just web pages? Good question, I am not entirely sure. It could be that web-based applications are web pages that run on server side code that are designed to be a specific tool to complete some task. Web pages are just publications that provide people with information. In the case of this blog, Textpattern is an application designed to assist me with publishing web pages for you to read.
An example of light web application development is how the news release site works. We are utilizing mailman but we had to develop an application to auto-magically make the content appear in a database and in an XML feed. For more complex web application development, we are building a system that works with Contribute 3, that allows for easy editing of database content and keeps a sandbox (or test site) to pass around drafts in with Contribute. More on that another time ;)
Most pages at UW (near 500 000 or so) are just publications. They provide information to people but are not utilized as a tool to complete any tasks (ok information is a tool but not the right kind of tool).
Developer or designer or editor or contributor or …?
There is a growing identity crisis in the general web world – what is web development and what isn’t? Lets not go down the classification route (another article perhaps) but instead quickly address the similarities between web development and software development with some required reading. Drew has a great article declaring web development is software development. I would have to agree. His next few posts in his blog are worth reading. What Drew has done is applied Joel on Software’s 12 Steps to Better Codeto his web team to see how they stack up. Follow the links and enjoy.
In the next part I will go over the roles in web page development.