1.4. The Evolution of Web Development

Now that we've seen the evolution of web sites, to web apps, to RIAs, what about evolution in terms of development? Has there been a parallel evolution there as well, an evolution of techniques, tools, and knowledge? You'd certainly hope, I think, that the answer is yes, and in fact it is.

Early on, way back in the distant year 1995 or so, when most "longtime" web developers (relatively speaking) began, you would frequently see someone with Notepad open if they used Windows, or maybe emacs or vi if they were *nix users. In either case, they were happily hacking away at code right there in their simple text editors, saving the file as an HTML file and loading it up in their browser right there, no server or anything like that. For a while this was quite sufficient because we weren't ready to develop web apps just yet—we were just getting our heads around web sites!^[]

^[] That's not to say some people don't still work this way—many do. In fact, I myself typically work at a level just above that: while it's not Notepad, I use a text editor called UltraEdit (www.ultraedit.com). It's a pretty advanced editor with lots of features that make life easier, but it's still a text editor in the end, not a full-blown IDE like many people prefer. To each his own!

Nowadays, there exists full-blown integrated development environments (IDEs) that provide all the tools developers tend to need: debuggers, code completion, code generators, profilers, and so on. Even without a full IDE, we have options like Firebug (www.getfirebug.com), which is an extension to the Firefox (www.firefox.com) browser. In fact, many developers find that Firebug is all they need these days, and I count myself among them.

So, there has clearly been an evolution in terms of tooling for client-side development. What about the code itself, though? Early on, people wrote a whole lot of JavaScript themselves because there wasn't much in the way of options. The best you could hope for was to find some useful code snippets out on the Web that you could... AHEM... borrow. You wound up typically taking that code, hacking it to death, and massaging it to fit your needs. If the code was good to begin with, which was always a questionable thing, the result wouldn't be too bad.

Using code snippets is part and parcel of developing software. We all do it, and the best among us probably do it more than others! But just grabbing snippets here and there isn't usually optimal, and also isn't typical in most programming environment where full-blown libraries are king. It took a while to get there, but client-side JavaScript development is now no different.