August 14, 2000

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Web Development Platforms
Avoid Recoding Hassles: Prepare Now For A .Net World

By Don Kiely

recurring theme in the materials Microsoft has published about the next-generation Visual Studio.net is how to prepare for the future. This is a bit odd for a product that won't be available until early 2001, but there's some value to the recommendations.

One suggestion Microsoft offers to Web developers is to build n-tier applications so that new servers, services, and user interfaces can be easily plugged in. Under any circumstances, this advice would be good design strategy, and is one that many enterprises are already following.

Probably the primary focus of corporate Windows and Web development efforts between now and the end of the year should be on reducing the amount of scripting in Web applications. Business rules and logic belong not in VBScript or JavaScript but in compiled, fast components running either on the Web server or a separate application server. Even some user interface manipulation script can be converted into compiled components, returning HTML strings that are sent directly to the browser.

Today, Web applications are just too complex to trust to huge application service provider files with script and HTML mixed together in a complex morass. The only legitimate purpose of scripting in current projects is to instantiate COM objects and call methods and send the results to the client browser.

Return to main story, "Stealing Java's Thunder."

Illustration by David Goldin

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