Web Development

Way back in 2002/2003, when I just started learning web development, I was faced with a dilemma. There was too many choices and tools that I can use. How many? Let me list them:

1. Perl/CGI
2. ASP - VB
3. PHP
4. JSP - Java
5. Python
6. ColdFusion
7. Flash

(Now we have J2EE, Ruby on Rails, Silverlight, and ASP.Net, to add into the mix.)

So what was the problem and what did I eventually chose to use?
1. Too complicated and unwieldy to use.
2. Mildly messy.
3. Extremely messy bloatware. Check out php problems which list all the problems that I encountered back in 2002/2003, WHICH I STILL ENCOUNTER TODAY.
4. Slooooowwwwww.
5. Mildly messy.
6. Extremely rigid, extremely hard to build code library. Plus, ColdFusion is dead. The current ColdFusion incarnation is actually a Java EE application.
7. Slooooowwwwww, actionscript too unwieldy to use.

What did I do? I learned them all. Jack of all trades, master of none. Of course, to be a good developer, you must master something. So after spending a few months working with all of them, I decided to stick with the ones that passes the ACID (atomicity, consistency, isolation, durability) test. This term is usually used for database transaction, but it works here too heh.

I chose to master the mildly messy and slow development languages/tools/environment. Namely ASP on IIS, JSP on Apache-Tomcat, and Python on Zope. 8 Years later, I'm still doing some web development, but now all I'm working on is ASP.net using C#. Next post I will explain why I am using ASP.net/C#, instead of PHP.