[Baypiggies] What's a web developer?

[RYAN DELUCCHI]

> At the risk of veering too far off this forum's charter...

As long as we don't start discussing, say: "The eating habits of  
llamas", I think you're safe :-)  Besides, I think have some  
flexibility in discussion topics keeps this discussion group vibrant  
and interesting.

> Frankly, I think the world of the web browser and user interfaces is  
> under high demand for innovation right now and will likely continue  
> to change radically every year or two for a while.  The idea that  
> everyone needs to know javascript will, I predict, fade in another 3  
> - 5 years to be replaced by higher level, better designed  
> abstractions, quite likely abstractions which marry what runs on the  
> user's device with what runs on the server such that the pairings  
> can be specified just once, more akin to RPC's in past decades.

Agreed.  on the server-side (which is where I have the larger majority  
of development experience) there seems to be a growing battle between  
the use of dynamic-languages in-place of Java (Python being a prime  
example here, of course).  Whereas the client-side seems to be in the  
most flux.  The browser compatibility issue is messy and while JQuery  
seems to help, there still are issues.  I'm relatively new to client- 
side development (AJAX in particular).  So, I suspect the issues  
mostly arise from use of JavaScript outside of JQuery (whether it be  
in legacy pre-JQuery code or in JS functions that were written to fill  
in gaps within the JQuery feature-set).

> ToscaWidgets is the only thing I've found that appears to be moving  
> in this direction yet, though.

I haven't heard of this one.  Looking at the site, it doesn't *appear*  
to be a very mature library yet though.

Ryan