It is the year of our Lord 2006, and I have finally fallen in with the crowd – I’m now blogging and also involved in making web-based applications. I must be trendy 
I recently had cause to put in a menu bar on some of the pages. Easy! I had been able to create menu bars for the past 10 years. Ahh – but never had I created one on a web-page. Oh – it’s ok, someone has done a Javascript one for me that’s popular and works. Well then, let’s at it!
I should run a contest for how long it took to get the bloody thing working properly.
2 hours?
4 hours?
7 hours and pi minutes?
Actually it was 10 hours, 9 of which were rather frustrating. Blame it on my incompetence if you will, blame it on my lack of experience with web-apps, blame it on the technology stack of HTTPS, HTML, CSS, XML, Servlets, and JSF but the point is it took me 9 hours longer to create a menu in 2006 than it did in 1996.
And this is totally indicative of my point: For shipping products out the door – mature technologies are the single biggest help (yes, ok, ok besides people)
In 1996, creating menus for Windows and DOS was so common that there were tools that helped you do it in minutes (yes, I am an ex-Visual Basic user). Everyone could create menus and text boxes and display text all so easily on a personal computer because we had been doing it since the year I was born. Productivity was some factor of e better in 1996 than 1976.
Not so for web-based applications because they are still immature, as in teenagers-immature. All the web technologies want to be noticed and suffer from peer-pressure:
WebGirl1: “I use Flex2, and it’s like, so wow”
WebGirl2: “Well, I wouldn’t been seen dead using anything but Ruby on Rails”
WebGirl_2045: “Oh, look at that Java Enterprise girl over there, what a retard”
WebGerlRokz25: “She probably can’t even do PHP5, CSS2 and Javascript”
When we spend more energy today on things that yesterday took little effort, then we know we’re not where we ought to be. And yes, I know that stateless HTTP wasn’t designed for what we’re doing and that distributed computing has always been a challange, and wah, wah.
But accept the fact that it may just be better to abandon all the cool cutting-edge technologies and go with something a little more tried and true. So don’t go out and start your next big-selling application in Lisp or using Ajax2.1, or MyNewStrutsFramework 0.1. Let the other companies loose money on it first 
Good point re: mature technologies making for better shipping products. However, Lisp has been around since the 1960s, so it’s hard to lump it in with the Johnny-come-lately AJAX (which is actually 8 years old) or RoR.
Comment by Lou — August 25, 2006 @ 8:28 am
True about Lisp, that wasn’t quite fair of me. Actually I know someone who’s developing something that will allow (at least some dialect) of Lisp to be able to make calls to Java. The idea being that it will enhance Lisp development by being able to utilise a lot of UI and other frameworks available on Java that aren’t on Lisp.
Comment by Paul Norrie — August 25, 2006 @ 8:44 am
So, just out of curiosity, how does your menu look when it opens over the top of a SELECT field?
Comment by AH — August 30, 2006 @ 5:24 pm