Comments on: Why Do Web Applications Stink So Badly?

By: Adam Sjøgren

Adam Sjøgren — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 12:13:05 +0000

I have recently found Hatta – http://hatta.sheep.art.pl/ – to be quite nice for a small, simple wiki.

It does not have a “graphical” editor, though – but I like its simplicity and featureset (clean URLs, backed by Mercurial, clean HTML/CSS that is easy to modify).

The author is really quick to update/respond to bug-reports etc.

By: Daniel

Daniel — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 18:50:08 +0000

Hi,

To all the posters expressing frustration trying to get Dokuwiki, Trac, etc. going, you may want to give BitNami a try (http://bitnami.org). It is free, we try our best to make the installation of the apps painless (to the point of including and configuring Apache, MySQL, etc. as part of the install) and to keep them secure

By: links for 2008-12-04 | Yostivanich.com

links for 2008-12-04 | Yostivanich.com — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 15:11:38 +0000

[...] Why Do Web Applications Stink So Badly? | The Changelog Web applications need to " Separate code from data, Separate code from configuration, Separate all of the above from the DocumentRoot to the greatest extent possible" (tags: webdevelopment programming) [...]

By: Edward

Edward — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 15:27:01 +0000

The problem is that the entry barrier for web development is pretty low. This means (relatively) stupid developers can also be productive and ‘get something done’. Stupid developers = stinky code. There you have it.

By: Jacques Chester

Jacques Chester — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 10:39:03 +0000

Welcome to my world. Try not to look at the rubbish strewn everywhere. My estimation is that systems designed to run inside VMs will eventually edge out systems which have to run on shared hosting.

By: James

James — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 08:04:01 +0000

My mistake… I just realized it’s less of an issue just so long as the web server is running with mpm_perchild or PHP using (F)CGI/suexec.

By: James

James — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 08:01:10 +0000

“At this point, most of them will tell you to chmod -R 777 the install directory”

This is why no one uses Linux.

By: Ralph Allan Rice

Ralph Allan Rice — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 04:38:58 +0000

I would agree whole-heartedly. I think that web applications can be much improved if they worked right out of the box… like most system applications do. They need to have installer that works with minimal headaches, little or no configuration changes, and (literally) no external dependencies.

By: mario

mario — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 00:32:15 +0000

The chmod 777 issue can be avoided on professionally set up webservers. If the web server is running with mpm_perchild or PHP using (F)CGI/suexec, it’s less of an issue.

Separating out the code into distributed directories (FHS) is not always possible due to the common PHP-with-HTML intermingling. Though, there are a few applications where it’s easy to accomplish. I’ve seen one of those Debian packages making sense actually.

But, can you provide a shining example of how you’d package a web app? Seen a good one lately?

(Personally I think it’s yet more troublesome that everyone clinches to SQL string concatenation, instead of using prepared statements.)

By: stephen

stephen — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 00:16:02 +0000

i kind of had the impression that he was talking about web apps in general..

oh, wait…