03/02/2012

Philosophy of Web Development

Are you a scripter or a coder?

Do you take exception to being called either?

The recent release of ASP.NET MVC Beta spurred some discussion about using MVC versus the Web Pages version. Just to cause trouble I like to throw PHP into the mix.

It seems the fight between camps is as fierce as the Mac vs. PC battle. Though in reality each product has its own strengths and weaknesses (and that goes for Macs and PCs as well).

If you're designing an app that reads the current time and displays it on a web page, you can bang that out in a script quicker than creating a structured object-oriented program using MVC.

Creating an intranet application to manage and track employee training would probably be a better choice for MVC and its highly structured approach. Lifecycle and maintenance of the solution needs to be considered when deciding how to implement the project. ASP.NET offers that flexibility – allowing a scripting approach or true object-oriented code using any of the languages supported by the common language runtime (CLR) of the .NET framework.

Still we all know developers who have their preferred language. And they use it. For everything. Brute force replaces simplicity and elegance. Two aspects of good code that make us all take a breath and say, “Wow”.

Do you use ASP.NET? If so which version do you prefer?

And you can share your stories of “that developer” you know here.