Its a dream, of every developer. A dream to have the freedom to build things in a single optimized, elegant fashion. Where the mind hasn’t got to think how to make things work on different platforms. Where one can focus on what is to be done and how best to make it more usable than how to make it work on a hundred platforms.
Lets take the most obvious example of the web, lets see what we have here…
1. We have different UI engines, starting from javascript, flash, ajax and then different implementations of these.
2. We have the age old battle of REST v/s SOAP
3. And most important of all we have browser wars. Is it IE, Firefox, Safari, Konqueror
So how does one make a decision on what technologies to use and what technologies to use and what platforms to support.
Does one go with what most used technologies/platforms? Or does one choose the best available, which probably has a brighter future too. Its a dilemma. Though we have all kind of statistics telling what is to be used and what not be, ideally you want to serve every user in a right manner and wouldn’t want to lose out.
I think its just a gut feel for now till we have Open standards…
Hmmm…. Somebody said long time back. The good thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from 🙂
I guess it has been utopian idea to have a uniform standard and I am not sure if just making them open will ensure that we will have only one standard. We are too diverse to agree on a single thing. From a philosophical perspective, I feel these differences is what keeps us alive. The world would be such a boring place if all of us had only standards to follow 🙂
BTW on REST vs SOAP, I thought that SOAP has finally gone to where it belonged – washing and cleaning 🙂
There are simple standards and complicated standards. e.g. SMTP vs X400. There are sometimes too many of them and this does create confusion. Programmers can write better code if the logic is simple. Simple standards get wider acceptance and faster deployment. I feel in the end user gets better served by simpler standards due to rapid grown in no of applications/deployment. e.g. in SMTP vs X400, the simple construction of messages and handshake makes it so easy to write an application to use SMTP and deliver a mail reliably even in an unreliable network.
Older still, and a true war, compared to these minor skirmishes, is Luddites vs. Technocrats