I haven’t read such a great piece in quite a while. Hell, I wish I have written that.
Web development sucks.
It’s true: web development, at its worst, is difficult, repetitive, and boring. The tools we have suck. At best, they make web development slightly less painful, but we’re a long way from making web development awesome.
The author main concerns are the lack of interoperability, rich-application support, concurrency, scale and “other stuff”:
- API Metering
- Backups & Snapshots
- Counters
- Cloud/Cluster Management Tools
- Instrumentation/Monitoring (Ganglia, Nagios)
- Failover
- Node addition/removal and hashing
- Autoscaling for cloud resources
- CSRF/XSS Protection
- Data Retention/Archival
- Deployment Tools
- Multiple Devs, Staging, Prod
- Data model upgrades
- Rolling deployments
- Multiple versions (selective beta)
- Bucket Testing
- Rollbacks
- CDN Management
- Distributed File Storage
- Distributed Log storage, analysis
- Graphing
- HTTP Caching
- Input/Output Filtering
- Memory Caching
- Non-relational Key Stores
- Rate Limiting
- Relational Storage
- Queues
- Rate Limiting
- Real-time messaging (XMPP)
- Search
- Ranging
- Geo
- Sharding
- Smart Caching
- dirty-table management
— Leonard Lin: Infrastructure for Modern Web Sites ☞
If you are a web developer, I’d say you should print this article out and carry it around with you. Spend at least 1 minute/day to think about the issues mentioned in there and the way you’d like to see them change. It may represent the Future of the Web Development Manifesto. Kudos Jacob Kaplan-Moss!
I’m not sure I’ll be using Django in 2020. I hope I will, of course, but it may be that Django simply can’t adapt in the next Age of web development.
However, if I’m not still using Python in 2020 I’m going to be seriously pissed off.
