If you work in IT, and you don’t already read The Daily WTF, you should. The site bills itself as documenting “curious perversions in IT” and I have to say that this is an understatement; the code that frequently shows up there is bad enough that the word “poor” does not begin to describe it. Sadly, I think much of the code behind so-called enterprise-grade software out there in the world is of the same calibre. We should be afraid.
I had to laugh at their recent skewering of AJAX and Web 2.0. I’ve complained about such things before, but this one does it in such a brilliant way that I really don’t have to say much more:
The introduction of the XMLHttpRequest component opened the doorway for a new breed of “fancy schmancy” web applications like Flickr, GMail, etc. This, in turn, spawned an entire sub-industry and a new series of buzzwords seemingly based on the names of household cleaning chemicals. It even incremented the current version of the Internet to 2.0.
Although the Web is apparently now at version 2.0 much of the software continues to be in beta.