Misguided zealots
Recently came across an really funny post about emerging web development technologies that are coming online and religious fervour that some people follow them with. While very humourous, Scott does hit on some good points. I continually run across techie zealots like the ones he mentions. People who support a specific technology to the end and blissfully ignore all others because "their's IS the best". There is no best, not for all instances. It depends on what the project is, what it needs to do, and ultimately what the client can afford. I used to work for a guy who had a great saying ...
Ford won car of the year with the Escort but do you really want to run a shipping business with Escorts?Get the right tool for the job, don't ignore better solutions just because it's not your preferred solution.
In the span of a few weeks I have had two very similar discussions with two different developers who are well versed in a certain evil empire's server side technology and not that familiar with another company's slick client side technology.
In the first instance, I was in a meeting discussing the use of Flash to enhance some searching and lookup features in a client's web site and one of their techies spoke up and smugly said "I can do that with .net, style sheets and dhtml". I proceeded to show them how with Flash remoting the screen does not need to refresh to retrieve data, the user can be easily and intuitively guided in following steps, and the entire widget just plain looks nicer than an html based page. He finally conceded, but not without a fight. People just do not get it. I'm not sure if it's ignorance, fear of the unknown, or a combination of the two but, there are way too many people afraid to even consider better technology solutions ..... just because.
In the second instance, I was walking a developer through how Flash remoting works and how it can pass objects and data back and forth between the client and server and either side natively understands what they received from the other. He was initially very hesitant that it would work as advertised and didn't think it was a good solution. We setup some simple tests to send and receive simple data types and then complex data objects. After 30 minutes of 'preaching' he converted. The server side technology they use is perfect for what they need (not my first pick but it does everything they need it to), the client side could be better, and now, based on our simple tests and an open minded client, it is about to become much better.
Click here to read the full post, and keep an open mind.
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Dec 10, 2007 at 2:33 PM
In a lot of cases the "techie zealots" are right. I'd make a fight for PHP vs ASP in web development any day of the weak. Does ASP have stuff it can do better than PHP? Sure, but it's inferior when it comes to most cases.
And this article is kind of old, but flash isn't the best option for such things anymore, especially not with AJAX becoming such a smooth mix. I suppose a few years ago it obviously wouldn't be that way though.
Dec 12, 2007 at 2:45 AM
I love reading older articles such as this to see what was a 'cutting edge' solution at the time. It just goes to show how fast internet technology has progressed in little over two years. Keep up the good work, Derrick.
Feb 18, 2008 at 9:40 AM
The ones using some technology they worship are few. The rest of us use more than one just to see what else is out there better for our projects. Thanks God for freeware and demos, otherwise we would end up buying every program on the market to see if it fits for our needs.