From an email rant I wrote earlier:
People who build web application frameworks are mostly feature bozos who don't seem to be bothered by constantly hopping up and down into one of the dozen abstraction layers they've placed between themselves and a web browser. At some point, when I was marking up a file which be used to generate an object which accessed a web service which looked in a database for a view description which would be used to render HTML with server side inclusions, I became delirious and took to drinkin'.
I'm spec'ing out some work for little web app and in the process decided to take another survey of Java web application frameworks (All you python and ruby weenies don't need to write me. I know, I know.) and I feel like something has been lost along the way as we stack turtle on turtle in order to ignore the minutia of the web to achieve 2.0-ness.
It seems like most of the innovations which excite people originate with the willingness to look at the minutia from which we're running and then tilt it all sideways. What if we used javascript and background threads to post and fetch XML? What if we paid attention to URL form instead of abstracting it in an CMS architecture's idea of state?
I've personally written more web application login systems than seems reasonable, but each time I do this I evolve my ideas about identity and community on the web. Perhaps on the Nth line of code when I set a cookie to expire yesterday my world will tilt and the others will follow.
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