james mckay dot net

If I can give one single piece of advice to ASP.NET developers anywhere, it will be this:

Learn another web development environment.

I really can not emphasise this strongly enough. From what I’ve observed, developers who only work with ASP.NET seem to have quite a bit of difficulty thinking outside of the Microsoft box. I am frequently confronted with indiscriminate and even inappropriate use of aspects of the .NET framework that don’t scale, such as DataSets, view state, or drag-and-drop programming. There’s nothing wrong with all these per se, but one of the most important things you need to know about how to use them is when not to use them. When all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail.

The ASP.NET Web Forms model in particular was originally designed to make web development look like Windows development, and ease the transition for VB6 developers from programming for rich Windows clients to the web. The result of this is that it has made the easy aspects of web development almost brain dead, while introducing a horrendously leaky abstraction layer that makes the hard things even harder, with masses of gotchas and pitfalls to trip you up if you venture outside it.

Languages such as PHP, Ruby on Rails or Python don’t have the same leaky abstractions, so developers tend to not only program “closer to the metal” but to think closer to the metal as well. This is why most of the cool sites, with stunning Ajax effects, tend to be written in these languages and target these platforms, while ASP.NET is largely languishing in the enterprisey world of Dilbert-esque cubicle farms.

I recommend you choose your alternative carefully, however. Rails and Python are the best choices. They will teach you patterns, practices, conventions, O/R mapping, MVC, and all round agile and pragmatic programming, and they tend to be taken up by smart and experienced developers who know what they’re doing. I have mixed feelings about Java: while you can learn a lot from it, like .NET it is very enterprisey, and at a time when everyone is getting excited about dynamic languages, Java is heading in completely the opposite direction. And I certainly don’t recommend PHP as a learning exercise: it is a beginners’ language — and a mind-bogglingly badly designed one at that — and while PHP guys are generally pretty enthusiastic and some of them are quite smart, and there are some decent PHP frameworks such as CakePHP and Symfony, the overwhelming majority of the PHP community simply don’t have what it takes to be programmers. Having said that, you need to know it, simply because it’s so pervasive.

You should also learn Linux if you can. It will teach you about modular design and the value of scripting everything that can be scripted. This is right at the heart of why Unix is Unix: a large part of its philosophy involves chaining text-based programs where the output of one can be passed as the input to another, to produce some fairly powerful command-based functionality, and scripting repetitive tasks so that their outcomes can be reliably reproduced. These are philosophies that seem largely lost in the world of Windows, which relies much more heavily on the visual, drag, drop and click approach of dialog boxes and wizards, even though they are every bit as essential if you want to have robust procedures and practices in place.

And whichever platform you take on board, you simply must familiarise yourself thoroughly with CSS, DHTML, JavaScript and Ajax, and at least one JavaScript framework such as Prototype or jQuery.

Personally, I still think that ASP.NET is technically the best platform on which to develop scalable, high performance, reliable web applications. However, in order to make the most of it, you need to have a good feel for what approaches you can import and learn from other platforms. Otherwise you will be stuck with the limitations and leaky abstractions of Web Forms.

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Posted at 14:00 on 6 June 2008.
Tagged: .NET, best practices, Java, PHP, programming, Python, recruitment, Ruby

(Update: it appears that I misjudged Grails here. The author of Grails has advised me that it is built on mature, tried and tested Java technologies such as Hibernate, Spring, and so on, and it seems that Groovy is not just another random programming language but an extension of Java itself to incorporate language features such as closures, dynamic typing and operator overloading. Unfortunately I won’t be able to attend the lecture myself, but it may well be worth checking out if you are a Sussex based Java developer. More details are in the comments.)

I was asked today if I’m interested in going to a lecture at Sussex University on a new web framework called Grails, which is written in a language called Groovy that runs on the Java platform.

Not really.

One glance tells me it’s Yet Another Rails Copycat. It seems that everyone and his dog are writing them these days, and most of them are completely unnecessary. If I really wanted to do something Rails-ish on the Java platform I’d use Rails with JRuby.

The fact of the matter is that while it’s worth knowing two or three different web frameworks, some of them are just too niche to bother with. Groovy is currently at number 32 in Tiobe’s Top Fifty, just above PL/I, Smalltalk and Haskell, with half the popularity of Fortran and a third of the popularity of Scheme. And nobody except Paul Graham writes web applications in Scheme.

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Posted at 15:16 on 7 March 2008.
Tagged: frameworks, Grails, Groovy, Java, Rails, Tiobe Index

When I’m learning new programming languages, concepts and things, I like to have the documentation available for download as a self-contained unit that I can refer to on my computer, rather than having to connect to the Internet to browse through it all online.

There are various reasons for this. The first is speed: since many APIs are overwhelmingly humungous these days, a quick, easy to use search facility and straightforward overviews and walkthroughs are a must. A .chm file is the best option — you can search it quickly and easily, and it usually doesn’t take more than a few seconds to find what you’re looking for. Individual HTML pages are not quite so good though, since searching is less straightforward. And accessing something on your hard disk is much faster than surfing the web, due to network latency and other similar factors.

Secondly, I prefer to spend the bulk of my time offline to help eliminate distractions. I’m not saying you should work offline exclusively: I have found a lot of help from online resources such as the ASP.NET forums, experts’ blogs, tutorials and the like. However, I do like to be disconnected from the Internet when I’m trying to work my way through some tricky problems. It helps to reduce distractions such as those Wikipedia loops that it’s so easy to get into — you know the kind of thing I mean, where you end up clicking on one interesting looking link after another for a while and suddenly realise that you’ve spent two hours reading a whole lot of total drivel and completely forgotten what you went online for in the first place.

Furthermore, at present at least, we still only have dial-up connectivity to the Internet at home rather than broadband, so going online is slow and cumbersome, though hopefully this will all change after we move house at the end of this month.

A lot of programming languages and platforms do quite well in this respect. The .net framework is a good example: the SDK documentation comes with examples, quickstarts, howtos and API specifications that you can install on your computer to refer to as and when you need it. PHP and Python are also pretty good, with comprehensive, searchable, easy to follow documentation available for download in CHM format.

Java is a bit more awkward. You can download the J2SE and the J2EE documentation, but they are a bit more fragmented, and contain a lot of links back to the web — in particular, from J2EE stuff to J2SE stuff, which is a little bit annoying. I’ve also found Ruby on Rails pretty frustrating. It would be great to have one download that covers both Rails and the Ruby core API, rather than having to go online all over the place, but there isn’t one. You can get a number of CHM files, but they seem to be strewn all over the place and don’t cover everything. This is a real shame, because I would love to be able to get my teeth into Rails in my spare time, and it seems that you can’t do that quite so effectively offline.

Still, at least the documentation is comprehensible and reasonably structured, which is a lot more than can be said for Perl. I really, really hate the Perl documentation. Look at the index, for starters — a list of cryptic, obfuscated and sometimes downright misleading names such as perlboot, perltoot, perllol, perlre, perlrun, perlpod. I can just about make sense of it, but it takes twice as long to find what you’re looking for as anywhere else. To a beginner, it is probably the most confusing, incomprehensible and intimidating mess you are ever likely to encounter.

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Posted at 21:00 on 11 August 2006.
Tagged: .NET, documentation, Java, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby

In Java you can mark a class method as a critical section, i.e. it will only be executed by one thread at a time, by using the synchronized keyword:

synchronized void myMethod()
{
  doSomething();
}

In C# you have to type in this ghastly (and rather obscure) mouthful:

using System.Runtime.CompilerServices;

[MethodImpl(MethodImplOptions.Synchronized)]
void MyMethod()
{
    DoSomething();
}

Why can’t we have a synchronized keyword in C# for this like in Java?

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Posted at 17:40 on 27 February 2006.
Tagged: C#, Java, threading