Saturday, October 18, 2014

Managing Web Complexity

So the wonderful world of the web technologies is great. HTML5, CSS, JavaScript, you get the idea. You can build many wonderful things with these. Enter a tool like jQuery, and you can do things even easier and better. You have plethora of JS frameworks to help you build a website or a web app... Backbone, Angular, Ember, etc. I believe these tools & technologies work well for a large swath of web targets. However, not all. I'll breakdown how I segment the web to make this more understandable. I think the web falls into the following three categories with some overlap in between.

Websites
Websites are documents. In fact they are primarily what the web tech family was designed for. It fits well with the DOM concept. It was to facilitate a cross-platform way to display information to the world in a quasi standards based way. This does not mean the content is static but rather interact with the user to a certain extent. Dynamic content may displayed with JS or PHP. But the overarching idea of this category is to get information out. Examples are corporate websites & personal websites.

Websitey apps
This is when websites begin to function more like an application. I don't particularly like the term "websitey application" but that's all I can come up with now. In this category, the "websitey application" is very interactive. User's have accounts, they do persistent actions as in order stuff, change stuff, add content, etc. This is the beginning of where the concept of the UI being a document begins to get a little shaky but still holds up decently well. Examples would be Amazon, eBay, Drupal & Wordpress sites, and really any site with ecommerce. Web tech & tools hold up pretty well for most of these as the complexity is still limited however the document or DOM concept begins to show it's weaknesses when the application is larger. As I said before, the DOM was intended for displaying content, not really for complex dynamic & interactive scenarios. At this point JavaScript becomes somewhat of a hack to manipulate the DOM into doing what needs done.

Enterprise business apps
These are full screen business tools. The concept of "website" is just not adequate. The app takes the full browser area, no header or footer, just a menu system, and a work area. These are really web implementations of what back in the day would have been full screen desktop business applications. Examples would be QuickBooks Online, Xero Accounting, Flex Rental Solutions, and thousands of other applications that fly unknown under the cover of the enterprise. The idea of directly using many of the web tools & technologies really shows their weaknesses here. Why? Complexity. The large enterprise app has a tremendous domain size and structure. This results in large numbers of components on the UI side. It's important in this area that the UI layer be self documenting in the form of packages (namespaces), component names, inheritance, and lot of the concepts on the backend that make development sane. Without structure, it literally becomes hard to find the component that you need to work on. In JS, there is no concept of class per file, so you can have many "objects" embedded within one JS file. That leaves you to a basic text search & find to be able to find your data (DTOs) & UI components. Bottom line, the large enterprise can implode in this space if a way is not found to manage complexity. And no Backbone is not always sufficient for this.


So what's the solution for complex web apps? Honestly at this point I'm not totally sure. In abstract terms, the solution is a tool that abstracts away from web technologies that allow you to code to an API instead of the direct implementation. This might mean using an enterprise proven language to compile to JavaScript such as GWT.  I see web technologies as a low level "language" to be built on top of to unleash it's true power. Yes, there are drawbacks to this, but I think the good far out weights the bad. Just like in the sense that there are probably advantages to writing certain solutions in assembly language, but in general it's a given that higher level languages offer a tremendous productivity benefit.

However, I want to look further. I find the concept of web abstraction compelling but I'm squeamish if it's really the long long term future.  As in will it work well in 10 years. I feel that maybe the root problem of doing large Enterprise web apps is the DOM. I watched a youtube video (watch it, it's good) the other day about web frameworks and one guy made the comment something along the lines of "if you were to build a UI toolkit today, it would look nothing like the DOM". I find that fascinating. I feel the DOM is kinda a misfit for web applications but it has so much inertia going for it now, that it may be years before people start to seriously question the DOM.

Post-DOM is going to take a long time. I could easily see it being close to a decade before it reaches critical mass. In the meantime, I want to see awesome web abstraction tools. I think Vaadin & GWT have a compelling use case. I have reservations about Vaadin latency & performance but I think it's UI concept is solid.

To me, any good UI toolkit needs to be powerful but yet at the same time kinda just fade into the background and allow you to focus on solving business problems. You should not have to think about browser idiosyncrasies, compatibility issues, and structural complexity.

Cheers to awesome web abstractions, managed web complexity, and the post-DOM way of building internet applications whatever that may be!