2006/02/27

More frontend ranting.

Firstly and most importantly, this is absolutely mindblowing, and I WANT ONE, Apple take note! etc. This hit the 'sphere about ten years ago but I also want to note it here.

Secondly, I have said many times before and I will say it again, defining page navigation as traversal within a directed state graph is a short, weak substitute for using a powerful language able to express arbitrarily complex logic, i.e. a programming language equipped with continuations, such as Ruby, Lisp, or Java.

Fourthly, most of what is written in a modern frontend should not be. We have page->BOM and BOM-> page inference/generation, smart binding code and ActiveRecord to light the way. XML config syntaxes and convoluted frameworks are not the answer. Java framework developers have no excuse for making their end-users write XML with the arrival of annotations in 1.5.

A good solution makes the simple things easy and the complex things possible. Too often, we make the simple things stupid and the complex things idiotic.