http://www.buntel.com/blog/index.cfm Tim Buntel's Blog en-us Thu, 02 Sep 2010 19:33:59 -0400 Tue, 24 Nov 2009 21:59:00 -0400 BlogCFC http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss tim@buntel.com tim@buntel.com tim@buntel.com http://www.buntel.com/blog/index.cfm no http://www.buntel.com/blog/index.cfm/2009/11/24/Web-developers-vs-real-developers There are millions of people in the world, building applications that will be used by many more millions of customers, who don't have computer science degrees and do not program in Java or C/C++. Shocking, I know, but I'm told it's true. They use ColdFusion and PHP and and Flex and AJAX and Ruby and countless other scripting languages and approaches to building solutions to their users' problems. These applications are used by companies, small and large, to track purchase orders, provide dashboard views into critical business data, help facilitate transactions with partners, make sales directly to customers, support every conceivable kind of workflow and report, and so on and so on. In other words, real applications that really matter. Why, then, are web developers and scripters dismissed with such condescension by so-called "real developers?" Why, then, do so many members of the computer-science-degreed illuminati sneer when I mention that scripters and web developers should employ real software development best-practices? Unfortunately, it's because they largely don't. Let's look at the biggies. Source code management? My years of working with web developers while on the ColdFusion team would lead me to put the percentage at somewhere around 25%. Too high? Low? I'm open to debate, but compared to the percentage of Java developers who use some sort of repository (maybe, what? 80% or more?) it's ridiculously low. Peer code review? Unit testing? Code coverage? Forget it! If we can't even get basic revision management into the routine, how can we expect any of these other good habits to take hold? Now, I certainly know that the reality isn't nearly as grim as many assume. I do know that many of you ColdFusion developers employ very sophisticated software development practices. But you should be the majority, not the minority. I never want to have the vast audience of web developers dismissed as "not strategic" for any of my products here. Alas, we do need to cultivate a meaningfully sized audience for software development tools from the web developer base if we are to deliver them the killer features that they deserve. So...am I fundamentally wrong in the assumption that only a small percentage of web devs do follow good practices? If not, am I naive in thinking that we can get more developers to start using them? Should we just be content with a small subset of you lurking among the Java developers? Thoughts? Software development Tue, 24 Nov 2009 21:59:00 -0400 http://www.buntel.com/blog/index.cfm/2009/11/24/Web-developers-vs-real-developers