Comment by phatbyte | Hacker News Reader

Comment by phatbyte | Hacker News Reader

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For a web developer creating a website these days by himself it's starting to get daunting, there's so much things you need to consider that you really need to start working with other people if you want to get your project running in a fair small amount of time and have a solid project.

Today you need to consider: responsive design,javascript frameworks, css frameworks, LESS, websockets, nosql vs rdbms, server-side frameworks, good quality design, good UX, cross-browsing etc..etc..

Back in the old days we didn't consider or even thought of half of this, not that it was better, obviously not, but most of us learned gradually. I would hate to be a programmer and have to start learning all of this from scratch :X , the entry barrier is much higher now, it's sad.

On the other hand, mobile apps don't have all this fat around, you can easily build an app by just using the APIs and focus on design and UX

You're glossing over the fact that for mobile apps you need to develop a separate app for each of the major mobile platforms out there, using a different toolset, process, and language for each one. Surely that's no less daunting than dealing with browser compatibility as a web developer.

I'm curious if you've ever done any mobile app development; You most certainly have to think about frameworks, design, different devices (especially on Android, where your app may be launched on any of a myriad of varying screen resolutions and sizes and densities). You still have to do quite a bit of non-straightforward work in order to create an app that is "responsive" to the device's size.

To be honest I was talking just about iPhone development which is the main mobile device to code for atm.

And yes, while you have to have responsive app (iPhone, Ipad, vertical/horizontal), you pretty much have the framework (cocoa) do all the heavy lifting for you, you don't have to worry about you content being viewed in a different device or other OS.

The Android on the other hand I got to agree with you, but Android itself is the Internet Explorer for mobile apps. I'd hate code for an android device as well :P

> nosql vs rdbms

Why not use both? For example, store your session info in redis, but have it refer to user data which is in the DB. This effectively turns it into a cache to make short-lived data cheaper.

That is what I've done at a few projects for work. Worked quite well.

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