Published

Posted at 21:51 on 03 February 2008

My blog entry on Volta, GWT and leaky abstractions has been reproduced in the .NET Developers' Journal.

This was a particularly interesting post because a lot of people are pretty impressed with Volta, and on the face of it, I was pointing out what I saw as its potential shortcomings. It has also attracted some comments from fairly accomplished developers -- Bruce Johnson of Google's GWT team, and Mats Helander, who wrote one of the first O/R mappers for the .net framework. However, while I may have come across a bit negatively, my opinion is not actually so much an anti-Volta/GWT/RJS one as a pro-JavaScript one. Since I started taking JavaScript seriously a year or so ago, I've really started to appreciate it, and to be honest, I think that developers who hide from it altogether behind abstraction layers of whatever nature are really losing out.

I've also had an e-mail from a journalist asking me for my opinion on MySpace for an article that she's writing. I'm not sure I'm the best person to ask on that one to be honest: my experience of MySpace is pretty much limited to opening an account, discovering it doesn't work with Windows Live Writer, closing it again, getting spammed, and experiencing all the yuk-that-is-gross reactions that any respectable, standards compliant, XHTML addicted web developer experiences on seeing your average profile page with gratuitous background images, animated GIFs, thrash metal background music, and broken rendering in Firefox.

It's interesting where blogging can take you...