Ever since I did front-end development with C & X Windows in the mid 90’s I’ve stuck to server-side development as a preference. Some ASP (no, not the nicer ASP.NET, but the original - *shudder*) in the late 90’s was a brief detour, but it’s been solidly server-side since.
We’ve all seen the trend towards applications migrating to the browser and the related resurgence of Javascript as a language.
Related to this, I’ve been working on a large application with a legacy Java Swing client for the last number of years and our attempts to modernise this with a service layer and a more ambitious change of client technology.
For various reasons we started with Flex at the tail-end of 2010, and for non-technical reasons, this approach was killed in late 2011 (no, not related to Adobe’s foot-in-mouth moment of appearing to shoot Flex in the head).
If I was to make the decision today, I’d go with a pure web approach. While we don’t have the luxury of doing the re-write at the moment, I do want to be ready with a recommendation on what we could use.
This leads to the TL;DR bit - holy shit! There’s a lot of frameworks and libraries for doing modern web stuff. It’s damn confusing and I’m sure there’s plenty of right answers.
We want to build a web application, not a web site, so I was leaning towards the single-page application style. Gmail is a classic example of this style. I’ve also never been a fan of server-side templating - this maybe a side-effect of doing ASP all those years ago. I’d prefer to keep the services as a pure API unencumbered with presentation stuff.
I’ll end this piece with a list of interesting libraries and frameworks I came across in my research and follow-up on what came next: