[AccessD] Burn-out

It seems that most of the best programming is now going into the development
of web and internet deployment. You have to look no further than Microsoft
new Windows 8 offering to realize that.

The key to all this development is the browser platform and its scripting
engine. There are various factions, like IE, Chrome, FireFox, Opera and
Safari and they have some of the most sophisticated programming in the
market today. JavaScript is different from conventional programming in which
it is totally event driven and is truly multi-tasking and multi-user. It is
object oriented and now with MS compliance with industry JS standards the
future look very rosy.  

(An aside: And as a added bonus that bound data is history!!! :-))

I like that you can just set a task like, place a new form on the page get
some data, fill it with that data and while just carrying on doing other
processes. One of the tricks to populating or updating pages really fast is
to just push the new pages structure and data straight between a set of
position ided DIV tags...let the engine do the work and it is a good 10
times as fast as any other method...just discovered this and was quite
delighted and I will never use innerHTML or preformatting again.

How awesome is the browser engines? For example; a programmer took the Open
Source V8 engine, built into Chrome browser and installed as a web server.
He put a wrapper around it and called it Node.js. It makes a great web
server. It is said that the coding in V8 engine performs at the level of
pure compiled C. Needless to say Node.js blows the doors of any other web
server; far faster than IIS or Apache. The beauty of it is that it just
takes JavaScript to code so all the FE and BE can be built having to learn
just one language...and it will run on any desktop, any platform or
smartphone/iphone/tablet etc.

Check it out: http://nodejs.org/
...and listen to the ramblings of the programmer at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jo_B4LTHi3I

A lot of this technology is really bleeding edge as it is growing so fast
but it is one of the most exciting fields of development work. The latest
standards, in JavaScript design, now that HTML 5 and CSS3 are set, is to
increase JS programming security and that should please a lot of the systems
guys.

In summary, JavaScript is easy to learn but it takes a lifetime to master.

Jim
 
-----Original Message-----
From: accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com
[mailto:accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of Kenneth Ismert
Sent: Tuesday, January 31, 2012 10:38 AM
To: accessd at databaseadvisors.com
Subject: Re: [AccessD] Burn-out

>
> Jim Dettman
>
> ... plus everything is heading to the web anyway, which is

something I've totally avoid to date (gonna pay big time

for that decision).
>

Not necessarily.  You've actually managed to avoid a LOT of drudgery in the
old web way of doing things (ASP.NET WinForms, browser Incompatibility,
poor Javascript performance, creaky, obsolete PHP hosting...)

You can now safely ignore that, and learn the cool, new web stuff:

* HTML5
* CSS3
* MVC frameworks (good choices exist for .NET and open-source platforms)
* Javascript frameworks (JQuery is well-supported by MVC frameworks)
* Easy-to-sync, fault-tolerant, scalable hosting solutions (for PHP, see
Pagoda Box ( http://newpagodabox.com/ ) and PHP Fog (
https://www.phpfog.com/ )

This range of new technology makes it much easier to target web apps for
mobile devices.

Plus, there are cool new platforms for Mobile, including Xamarin (
http://xamarin.com/ ), which is a .NET / Mono / Visual Studio platform for
developing Android and iOS applications.

So, you can view your procrastination as strategically waiting for a time
like now to jump into cool new things.

-Ken
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