The Pensieve

With the onset of interactive web pages that update dynamically the moment you move your mouse over a control, development of an AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript And XML) based web site adds to the complexity. For one, they mess up with your browser history and limit your ability to bookmark a particular page as almost all contents are loaded "in-page". The other disadvantage I see is the in-ability of custom scripts to access the site and extract information. For example, I can write a perl script that can access the Indian Railways page and query the arrival of a particular train. If the site used AJAX, it's going to be more difficult. Cellphones that bundle with micro-browsers either lack javascripting or access is usually blocked by service providers leaving you grapping with an empty framework with no actual data in it. Development wise, you introduce a sense of uncertainty into your web-page where when your page looks like it has completed loading, more data is still b...

Call me an old timer With new fangled ASP.NET, high end IDEs, wizards and code generators, the learning curve is high compared to the older times where a simple web based application can be created in a matter of minutes with PHP and MySQL. VS2005 takes web development to a new paradigm, where you follow the model of a regular GUI application development. You add event handers to the various 'controls' in your ASP.NET project. It is usually not very visible on what happens then. Some times, your validation logic that you had attached executes on the client side, and sometimes on the sever side based on the browser capabilities. This results in complication. At-least this is what I gather on my first attempt to learn ASP.NET. This is in addition to evaluating Ruby on rails, PHP, Perl from which I will be deciding on one to suite my needs. How I wish for the older days where a plain old server side script just simply executed on only the, well, server!