Geir Arne Brevik, February 11 2006:
Future of Web Apps: Clean URLs, useful APIs and other web 2.0 lessons
Carson Workshop’s The future of web apps summit 2006 is over, and I’m on my hotel bed again. My head is full of JavaScript objects and API architectures, but I’ll have a go at this blogpost anyway.
Things I learned
- An API should be at the center of your application – An API is not only useful to reach the alpha geeks, so they can build crazy widgets. An API can be used as a foundation layer for much of the functionality in your application, like Shaun Inman does with Pepper in Mint (without the default Pepper, the application is nothing), and an API is the way to parse your AJAX requests. And last, but not least, if you design your app for everyone to access it, you’re probably less likely to take stupid shortcuts.
- JavaScript closures – I knew about this before, but now I think I understand the beauty of it, thanks to Steffen Meschkat, one of Google’s JavaScript gurus, that told us all about the good and bad of the language. (here’s an introduction to closures )
- Ship, then add features – This is more of a reminder than a new thing, but important nonetheless. Keeping the feature-set at a minimum helps you focus on the unique aspects of your app, improves code quality and makes you actually ship. Then, you can add features, when you see how your users actually interact with you app.
Things I got confirmed
- We all make the same mistakes – I’ve messed up. Several times. I’ve postponed the documentation of code, avoided systematic testing, and seen deadlines come and go. That’s very, very common. That is not to say it’s cool to be a bad programmer. Quite the contrary; You’re not alone when you struggle to overcome these mistakes. And there are tools that can help you get more productive and happy. According to it’s creator, the tool is called Ruby on Rails.
- Clean URLs are important – Half of the speakers talked about the importance of bq. readable, reliable and hackable URLs Tom Coats. Johan and I struggled a lot to get this to work properly on Trafo.no. We have a further refined piece of URL rewrite php code we might release in the near future…
- We’re not unique snowflakes – And I’m not referring to David Heinemeier Hansson’s argument about programmers making the same code over and over again. I’m thinking about the 800 geeks in the conference center with PowerBooks in their laps, web 2.0 note-taking software loaded up in Safari, and a common skepticism towards Adobe Flex
Things that surprised me
- David Heinemeier Hansson actually dared to say that “php is evil”. Well, I know what he mean, and it felt good to hear it out loud. Aside from that, Hansson is a good preacher. As a fellow conference participant pointed out; He could be a really good priest.
- Ryan Carson actually dared to reveal the whole budget from their development of Dropsend. That was very interesting.
- How incredible good speaker Tom Coates was _ I’ve listened to him on a podcast some time ago, but I didn’t recall that he was this good at painting a clear, big picture out of the details of web development. Yahoo did a very smart thing recruiting him from the BBC. And that’s another thing; Yahoo is really as big a player in this game as Google. Of the eight speakers, three came from Yahoo, or Yahoo-aquired companies. Just one guy came from Google. On the other hand, he turned out to be the biggest geek.
Ideas I got
- Build a sidebar controller for Typo (blogging software I use) that extract the “watched” pages from Mint, and display them as most popular pages. I even talked to Mr. Inman himself about it, and he thought it was a good idea. Yay! A web celebrity encounter!
Update 16/02: Geoffrey Topfunky Grosenbach has made an ActiveRecord model, so you can access Mint’s access database table from Typo. Now I just have to look into interpreting the checksums in that table to extract the watched pages…
- Signupr – A web 2.0 service that signs you up to beta (or even alpha!) testing of upcoming Web 2.0 services. Like ma.gnolia, Makadi, Vitamin and Newsvine. (Grow up, people. This is just stupid. Why should I give you my e-mail if you won’t even show me what you’re doing?!?)
Read on…
i-boy has made his notes from the conference available online. They’re the same as mine, only better.
You can also spend your life reading more notes from the conference by reading all blogposts tagged with futureofwebapps.
