Are WebDevs and their Frameworks
keeping up with the times?
Swaroop C H
Barcamp Bangalore 8
March 7-8, 2009

Audience
• WebDevs (short for “web developers”)
▫ Where “web development” includes both coding
and operations
▫ Coding includes frontend frameworks, backend
frameworks, etc.
▫ Operations include infrastructure, deployment,
analytics, availability, etc.

1a. Advent of Cloud Computing
• Google AppEngine
• Amazon EC2
• Heroku
• Mosso by Rackspace
• Azure by Microsoft
• Project Caroline and WebStack by Sun
▫ http://blogs.sun.com/WebScale/entry/mysql_in_the_cloud
• Flexiscale
• GoGrid
• AppNexus

1b. Advent of Cloud Databases
• Hypertable
• CouchDB
• DrizzleDB
• Amazon SimpleDB
• Dynomite (based on Amazon Dynamo paper)
• ThruDB
• StrokeDB
• Facebook’s Project Cassandra
• More at
http://www.swaroopch.com/notes/Distributed_Storage_Systems

How are webapp frameworks affected?
• Data is not the same anymore
• The ORMs won’t work!
▫ There is no structured database
▫ There is no spoon, err, no SQL
▫ There are, possibly, no JOINs (think BigTable)
• Sharding, concurrency, etc. are now core to the
system
• Cloud computing facilities have many constraints

Are webapp frameworks coping?
• This session is intended for the audience to
educate me on the state of things
• Saw some discussions on making Django more
AppEngine-friendly, but these are very very early
discussions
• What is the state w.r.t.
▫ Ruby on Rails?
▫ Symfony, CakePHP, etc. ?
• Discuss!

2. Advent of RIAs
• AJAX Frameworks
• Adobe Flex
• Microsoft Silverlight

How are webapp frameworks affected?
• AJAX is good, but should we assume HTML and
JavaScript everywhere?
▫ Very few places that encourage discussion of
webapps with non-HTML frontends
• Flex and Silverlight have their own places as well.

Are webapp frameworks coping?
• Discuss!

3. Advent of APIs
• Webapps are now assumed to provide an API
along with the frontend application
▫ Every photo website, microblogging website, social
networking site, todo list site, has an API now
(That’s why things like www.ping.fm are possible)
▫ And with APIs comes OAuth, rate limiting, etc.

How are webapp frameworks affected?
• Shouldn’t the API building be part of the webapp
framework, should it be an addon?

Are webapp frameworks coping?
• Merb/Rails 3 has `responds_to` and
`responds_with`
▫ http://www.loudthinking.com/posts/37-bringing-merbs-providesdispl
• Discuss!

4. What else is affected?
• http://randomfoo.net/2009/01/28/infrastructure-for
▫ Logging
▫ Analytics
Backup
▫
Deployment tools
▫
▫ Caching
▫ Search
etc.
▫

5. Step back for a moment
• “Web development includes frontend
frameworks, backend frameworks, infrastructure,
operations including deployment, scalability,
reliability, etc. etc. !”
• Are these just random technologies evolving or is
there something important going on here?
▫ Should we be paying attention to all this?
▫ If so, are our lives getting harder or easier?

Thanks!
Swaroop C H
Email: swaroop@swaroopch.com
Blog: http://www.swaroopch.com/posts/