Welcome to the new century where we all know how web applications are developed. You have your MVC web framework with your ORM on top of the relational database that is used as a datastore. You test it with Selenium and you swear at Javascript and IE.
But do we really know how to develop web applications or are we all in a cul-de-sac of web conventions. Is it really necessary to fire up a browser to test your application? Surely AJAX and Javascript is no more or less testable than anything else. Isn't it time we forced our clients to move to IE or up sticks to a new browser altogether?
MVC? Yesterday's news, now we have MVP or VROOM. Why write any Javascript when you can write a Javascript generator in your preferred development language. Or perhaps we can write the entire application in Javascript? Can we use Javascript to generate our CSS?
On the data front we now have document databases, graph databases, XML databases. Why do we try and store objects to the database when the web isn't made up of objects?
Why are CMS systems so complicated and so common? Surely we can just generate a website in the same way as we generate Controller code in Rails and its clones. Why the intermediary of the code in the first place?
To try and tackle some of our web conventions and propose some new "unconventions" we will be assembling a crack team of web architects and practioners. They will be proposing a new best practice or the repeal of an outdated one and then we'll throw open the questions to audience. Grill the panel, ask them what a "Transaction modelled in the Domain" means, after all they are meant to be experts.
Panellists will include: Dan North, Ian Robinson, Felix Leipold and Alistair Jones. See wiki for more details.
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