Maintaining Future Web Applications: It's Time to Brace Ourselves

After attending the recent Sun Tech Days event, I was duly impressed by the latest techniques/tools Web Engineers have at their disposal. At the same time, I couldn’t help feeling a bit uneasy, seeing how rapid development of Web apps is receiving the lion’s share of attention, maintainability of Web apps hardly receiving a thought. Some of my observations along this line of thoghts:

The rush towards visual programming:

• The Good: While visual (code-less, drag and drop) programming is nothing new, I'm still impressed by how fast Web programming is attaining visual programming capabilities; even coming close to fully-fledged RAD technologies such as VB. UI frameworks such as JSF is a major step in this direction, ably supported by tools such as Java Studio Creator. Visual programming indeed helps a lot when it comes to building Web applications rapidly.
• The Not-so-good: Visual programming does very little to improve the maintainability of the application being built. For example, the ease of drag-and-drop coding deters the application of better reuse techniques; techniques although more-difficult-to-apply, could result in more maintainable code. Therefore, it’s only a matter of time before we have to face in Web apps the same maintenance problems we had in legacy VB applications (perhaps even worse, due to additional complications of the Web).
  

Overuse of frameworks:

• The Good: It has become common practice to use of frameworks such as Struts, Hybernate, and Spring as the foundations on which enterprise scale Web applications are built.
• The Bad: A negative side effect of these frameworks is that they tend to fragment code, particularly into various configuration files. Historically, Web apps have been hard to test, but this fragmentation makes it even less testable. Needless to say a less-testable system is a less-maintainable one.

Overdoing that 'AJAX ' thing:

• The Good: No doubt AJAX is a cool technology and it’s going to hang around for a while. It’s a significant step towards making Web applications behave more like traditional desktop applications.
• The Bad: However, AJAX code is complex and hard to work with (to debug for example), unless you have a lot of tool support. Again this is bad news for maintainers of Web applications.

Many thanks to Chris Loosley for saying some nice things about this post...