Dino Esposito - Modern Web Development: Understanding domains, technologies, and user experience

Dino Esposito

PUBLISHED BY
Microsoft Press
A division of Microsoft Corporation
One Microsoft Way
Redmond, Washington 98052-6399

Copyright 2016 by Dino Esposito

All rights reserved. No part of the contents of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without the written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015934865
ISBN: 978-1-5093-0001-3

Printed and bound in the United States of America.

First Printing

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Acquisitions and Developmental Editor: Devon Musgrave
Project Editor: Steve Sagman
Editorial Production: Waypoint Press
Technical Reviewer: Marc Young
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Indexer: Toni Culley
Cover: Twist Creative Seattle and Joel Panchot

To my wife Silvia.

You make me feel sandy like a clepsydra. I get empty and filled all the time; but its such a thin kind of sand that even when Im full, without you, I just feel empty.

DINO

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No later than the summer of 2008, I gave a few public talks about the future of the web. Customers who hired me at the time heard from this expert voice that the web of the (near) future would be significantly different than what it was looking like in 2008. At the time, the brilliant future of the web seemed to be in the hands of compiled code run from within the browser.

JavaScript? Its dead, at last! ASP.NET? Its gone, thankfully!

The future as I saw it back then (along with many other experts) had only rich-client technologies in store for millions of us. And Microsoft Silverlight stood at the center of the new web universe.

If you started hibernating in 2008 and woke up any time in the past three or even four years, you found a different world than I, or possibly you, had imagined. It was solidly server-side-based and different from what the expectations were. Today, you find a web world in which JavaScript reigns and, with it, a ton of ad hoc tools and frameworks.

Customers who paid good money to hear my expert voice back in 2008 tell them to invest in Silverlight are now paying good money to switch back more or less to where they were in 2008.

Well, not exactly.

This book comes at a weird time, but its not a weird book. Two decades of web experience taught us that real revolutions happen when, mostly due to rare astral alignments, a bunch of people happen to have the same programming needs. So it was for Ajax, and so it is today for responsive and interactive front ends. JavaScript has been revived because it is the simplest way for programmers to achieve goals. And because it is still effective enough to make solutions easy to sell.

Planning a web solution today means having a solid server-side environment to serve rich and interactive HTML pages, styled with CSS and actioned by JavaScript. Even though a lot of new ad hoc technologies have been developed, the real sticking points with modern applications (which are for the most part web applications) are domain analysis and the supporting architecture. Everything else revolves around the implementation of a few common practices for a few common tasks, some of which are relatively new requirementsfor example, push notifications from the server.

In this book, you will find a summary of practices and techniques that guarantee effective solutions for your customers. The point today is no longer to use the latest release of the latest platform or framework. The point is just to give customers what they really want. Tools to build software exist; ideas and plans make the difference.