Simplified.
I have a problem with many of the current web frameworks out there. They obscure the nuts and bolts of web development too much, basically.
For me, this began with all the additional stuff that Microsoft shoved in when they created ASP.NET - sure, things like the DataGrid are powerful and stuff, but they’ve taken a degree of control away from the programmer. If I want to display a table of data, I want to code it the way I want it. As someone who’s fairly handy with server-side programming, I’ll be able to code something that’s more lightweight, customisable and fit for the task than some catch-all component Microsoft have written.
I recently coded a site in ASP.NET where I actively avoided almost all of Microsoft’s controls and components, in order to actually achieve what I wanted to achieve. And I’m told that it’s apparently bad programming practice to do this. Who says? It gets the job done, doesn’t it? And I think the code has a considerably smaller footprint than an equivalent that’s full of components and controls.
Still, as a rule, ASP.NET isn’t my bag - I’m much more of an open source guy these days. I’m going to start playing with some PHP frameworks soon, in order to attempt to improve the speed at which I can prototype website features - I’ve targetted CakePHP and Symfony for my attention, and I’m hoping they give me a bit more transparency when it comes to working with them.
Still… what do I know. I bet people bitched far more than this when people started moving away from machine code to high-level languages. It’ll probably end up being a case of “adapt or die”, but I’ll keep moaning about it in the meantime.
