Some Web Development

It is late, but not too late, so I thought I'd give the reader (you!) a quick peak into my brain right now so I can take a break from some web development work. You'll be stoked to know that I'm going to ramble about web development!! Yaays for some, Oh noes for others. You've been warned.

Lately I've been working as a consultant to do some web development for a huge company (which provides natural gas and electricity for 66% of California...figure it out). The progress of work is going fairly well which is nice because I haven't done any hard-core web development work in over ten months...but moving on, as a consultant I am given a set of, "I want it to do this," and some, "We need this type of functionality," along with a million other buzzwords that include, but are not limited to: streamline, intuitive, microformats, RSS, and the worst one of them all "Web 2.0".

This particular project has me coding with PHP and using mySQL as the database. Now I have had some experience with Ruby on Rails and AJAX, which falls under the umbrella of that glorious "Web 2.0" title, which involved PHP, javascript, XML, and mySQL. AJAX can do and create some neat effects for the user, but doesn't mean that we should try create everything in an AJAX fashion. With this project I was given the instructions to make the project as 2.0 as I could...of course I question this (meaning I question it in my head, they're the ones signing the checks) because I'm almost sure that: A) Web 2.0 doesn't have an official set of standards (at least to my knowledge) which define something as 2.0 verses 1.0 (or maybe even Web 1.54f ;)) and B)the project manager will take some nice looking css or DHTML effects as 2.0ish and not know any better.

I don't know where this "Web 2.0" obsession came from and why it is such a necessary thing to try to achieve in web development. As any developer knows there are multiple solutions for any given problem and singularity idea that if something isn't "Web 2.0" then it is behind the times is quite absurd.

In my next consultant job when asked to make something "2.0" I might just have to say, "Yeah, I can do that, but I can make it 'Haselton 4.6' which is something that is newer and is a higher number than that '2.0'" and then just make some flamboyant DHTML/PHP/ASP.NET project...or not and just nod my head and collect the check.