Comment by kabdib | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kabdib | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Y'all saying "This is largely a solved problem" are in denial.

Also: You need to kill the standards committees that keep coming up with stuff like WSDL and SOAP. Pretty much anything based on XML and you should get out the pitchforks and torches.

Stop hurting yourselves.

I am speaking as an OS guy who also does embedded systems. We have our own pieces of hell to deal with (over-designed and under-implemented protocols in USB and networking, natch; also hardware engineers who like to take away components to save money).

The last time I looked at web development it was a steaming heap of vile, corrupted technologies that barely talked to each other. Maybe alien unicorns have descended and made everything fluffy and nice since I looked last. There /is/ hope. I mean, you deprecated BLINK tags.

Honestly, do the database people and the client people ever talk to each other? Do the people doing browsers ever talk to the people doing IDEs? Or is this like different tribes, and they are trying to screw each other over in some kind of zero-sum game?

Y'all are fooling yourselves if you think there's not a problem. Look at the number of frameworks; these things wouldn't exist unless something needed fixing. Last time I was in the bookstore it seemed like there a dozen linear feet of dead trees describing frameworks. God knows how many there are online.

I think you need an intervention.

Web development has long since moved on past WSDL and SOAP; they've now been relegated to the domain of Enterprise software.

As for the claim that the proliferation of frameworks indicates a problem, well I completely disagree. They are so many frameworks because progress is being made improving the technology all the time. This is a good thing; it is how progress is made. By your logic there is a problem with the automotive industry (people keep making new cars), the computer hardware industry (new chips), in fact pretty much every industry that exists today.

It's human (hacker?) nature to think there must be a better way, and do something about it.

Enterprise software is where much of the industry is employed. SOAP is becoming more prevalent, not less.

> Enterprise software is where much of the industry is employed. > SOAP is becoming more prevalent, not less.

[ citation needed ]

If you find the first statement controversial then I suggest stepping outside of the world of HN once in a while.

As to the second claim, SOAP is very popular with Java and .Net developers, especially when they have taken up the latest fad, SOA. There are also entire industries, such as healthcare, that are heavily pushing SOAP-based standards for data exchange.

SOAP seems to have its niches, but I live in the enterprise world myself and even those using SOA seem to be moving away from SOAP when they can.

And when it comes to medical systems, most of the time JSON wouldn't be enough anyway.

This is a thread about web development though.

Can enterprise software not be web-based?

Yes it can. In fact if the article was about how enterprise web development using SOAP and XML was broken I'd be fully supportive of it, given how web development has matured past that to leaner, more suitable technologies (REST/JSON)

But that's really a different conversation.

You must be using "web development" in a way that I have never encountered before.

I think you're missing the mark if you condemn "Web development" as a whole just because enterprise culture is pathological.

|"By your logic there is a problem with the automotive industry (people keep making new cars)"

But you don't see infinite procedures to make the same car. Web frameworks aren't solving new problems. They are competing with other frameworks which does the exact same thing.

I empathize with this point (I even up voted) but I don't entirely agree.

I want to say that we should have some grand unified abstraction for describing web applications but that doesn't represent reality outside of web development. We're still living in a world with multiple OSs (never mind the browser war).

The technology world isn't isn't unified.

if it truly were, would we be able to express solutions to arbitrary problems?

Such a unified solution as you hope for would implicitly prevent the flexibility that allows for technological advancement. Ruby on Rails "golden path" approach is actually a good example of this. Development is easier following the path. Deviate and it gets tricky quickly. But at least it's possible to deviate.

I believe the solution you posit would result in a black box approach to development with only one right way if even one at all. Deviation from the intended use of such a tool would likely be impossible.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com