An Irresistable Change

I am an ardent follower of some of the games in Olympics. I frequently browse various websites for latest Olympics updates. What enthralls me is how much the technology advanced.

Few years back when I had my hands on making my first website, all I did was built it using native html, later i ventured into areas of server side scripting like jsp and php. At the end of my b-tech I had experience in programming in Jsp, Php, Html, Css, Ajax and Javascript. Ajax was then the latest technology I knew. A year after my b-tech i worked in tech m in ASP .Net, building a website for a networking company. We used Asp. Net 2.0 and some basic technologies.

Though i am equipped with so many technologies, today I feel like an isolated man. Such has been the change in the web development technologies. Change is an inherent feature of man kind. It is change that has brought man kind to these levels of development. Over the past few years the transient has become even more transient. The countries which have embraced change are today the most developed countries. To keep the article simple, I am concentrating only on technological aspects, and not on cultural or social effects of such changes, which are beyond my ken.

As I was saying web development in this year and a half has advanced to great heights. Take Asp. Net for example, today we get to here new terms like LINQ, XAML, Silverlight, Expression Studio and so on. What's the use of so many technologies? Ten years back all we did on web sites was build static pages. Then came server side scripting, which caused a revolution, we could now retrieve data from the users. Then we got technologies like Ajax and rss feeds. Users could build there own customized pages and retrieve the latest new on the fly without even refreshing a page. Till yesterday, we had to merge multiple technologies by multiple vendors to build a website. For ex. to build a highly interactive website, we needed to learn HTML, Javascript, a server side language, sql, flash programming and the list goes on. With the latest Microsoft products it is no longer required. Now Xaml makes us program in xml, sound crazy right. Linq makes us write sql in .Net languages and Silverlight is coding flash using .net technologies. Everything integrated into Microsoft.

Some developments are such that you can create a website and include a third party tool in the website without making any changes to your code. So now the web page is an integration of your work, feeds from other sites and tools from other sites. These tools run on their servers :-). So here you are running your pages on somebody's web server and running tools of another server in your pages. Dynamic? No it's a dynamite.

At this junture I just want to clear a common misconception. As more and more technologies come through, the amount we code doesn't increase it reduces significantly, we get to build better applications at minimum complexity. What makes us retard from such advancements is our resistance to change.

For us, Indians, to advance in time we need change and we need expedite change. I mentioned ASP. Net and my ignorance. What about Java? I haven't got my eye on java since 3 years. Today whatever the java programmers speak sound more Chinese to my ears.

Companies like Tech M and Yalamanchili should look forward in bringing a change in their work environment and integrate thought process into their curriculum. Along with that, the weekly updates and lectures on the latest tools in web development should be made available. Encourage thought, appreciate experiments, bring a change.

Note:

I said i had been developing in .Net, yet I felt isolated at the same time because the technologies we used in tech m were a year or two older. So many new technologies got formed in the meanwhile that you get a feeling of a prehistoric man.