InfoQ: Will the Rise of Javascript Mean the End of LAMP?
No quite ... as I understand REST, it does not mean serve up a bunch of HTML to a browser. REST is about exchanging resource representations that are directly related to the application state, and by composition the resource state. The resource representation embeds "links" which define what you can do next from that resource perspective. This model does not assume any UI, though it works best to support a UI.
Our industry has been looking for ages for a Web Application Architecture that’s decent and generic, starting with the days of Web Objects (dynamic HTML) to node.js today. I would conclude: unsuccessfully. It has been a complete mess leading to very large amounts of failed projects or under performing systems. The big guys from Yahoo to Google or Amazon, not to mention Facebook love the Web for its ability to bring billions of users to their domain. Very few benefit, everyone else pays the price for a suboptimal architecture (by a large margin), decades old technologies and complete lack of evolution.
Telling us that now the Web was all along event driven -and we didn’t know it- is quite a stretch for a technology that has no eventing mechanism whatsoever. When you see how much a hack is XMPP, I can only repeat whatsoever. Now give me a socket and I’ll do anything you want, for sure, but please, let’s stop the nonsense of a) telling everyone that Web technologies are well designed for modern information system architectures -they are not, b) let’s stop pretending we can fix completely broken technologies with yet another so called silver bullet.
The fundamental problem our industry refuses to admit is that the world (of information technology) is not “monadic”, everyone that comes with a technology or paradigm where “everything is XXX” (we’ve tried XXX = table, procedure, object, service, (business) process, resource, event, function … That monadism is bound to fail, yesterday, today and tomorrow. The world of information technology is polyadic, it requires all these concepts to be carefully articulated in a single programming model. Three years ago I developed WSPER (Web, Service, Process Event Resource) to show that it was possible and beneficial to do so. But it looks like we are still looking, after 50 years or so of software engineering, for that elusive monadic solution. Whether it is for the Web, Client/Server, Mainframe, Mobile, … that solution does not exist. Any reasonable human would have long moved on to expand the horizon. Not our industry.
As Tim Bray would say it so well, the emperor has no clothes. The Web as we know it is dead, unable to adapt as all its followers think this is the ultimate platform. Think that “Javascript” can salvage it is actually quite ironic.
