Everything Old is New Again – X11 and the Mainframe
I was thinking about the current state of web development - where it's used well, where it's not, and what people are trying to force it to do, and it lead me to giggle as I realized that George Santayana could as easily have been talking about computer developers:
Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
I guess the extension is more on point:
Those who don't study what was written are doomed to rewrite it.
The Web 2.0 craze is trying to take a great static-content system and make it interactive. Why? Because the client footprint is so small and you can collect hardware in a central location for easier support and maintenance. Again, we have the re-birth of the mainframe/centralized computer resources. Just now they are called clusters and web server as opposed to AS/400 or IBM mainframes.
It's funny, because each time I think about the goal of the Web 2.0 I come to the same place X11 was over a decade ago - a way to have an interactive experience on the client machine while having the processing done on heavy iron at a remote location. Why not drop Web 2.0 and just do X11 again? I'm convinced that it's because the developers doing this never learned what the old X11 was all about and why it was created.
OK, X11 didn't have a lot of pretty graphics by today's standards, but it was designed to be a remote application delivery platform and optimized for that. Give it better graphics like a decent widget set on all machines and all of a sudden you don't need all the interactivity of the Google Docs - you can run it locally and get just the display in the native widget set.
The other extreme is to take the AJAX and build it up to the point that it also includes a widget set on the client end - much like Firefox, et. al. has done with it's markup. It gives you a complete widget set on the client-side (just like X11) and then a way to communicate with the back-end. I'm amazed at the similarities between these two. But one has 20+ years of development and the other is "cool and new".
Before you spend time to write something that you think is clearly so unique that it's never been done before, stop and think. Ask. I'm willing to bet that a lot of the ideas that are so "new" are really just re-inventions.
Learn from the past.