Old and Busted?

November 7, 2008 02:25 PM

After writing my previous blog post, I got to thinking about why I still use SnakeSkin for personal projects.

It's a valid question. Sure, I had three years of experience with it and I've adapted to its way of thinking. I have a good Linux VPS host, so it's a perfect fit for me. But you can argue that it doesn't do a lot of things that other frameworks do. In fact, lack of community support is probably one of its biggest weaknesses.

Or is it? My website works just fine. It does everything I want it to do for the moment, and it's very possible to add new functionality (I converted my photos section to pull data from Flickr yesterday). Using a framework that has a lot of community support wouldn't necessarily help me at this point. Actually, when I got to thinking about it, it seems like it would merely increase my signal-to-noise ratio.

Let's say I was using ASP.NET. Microsoft has been really good about releasing new features--we just recently saw the launch of .NET 3.5 SP 1, for example. If my website were written in .NET 2.0, I'd be feeling pretty old and busted right now.

I mean, I need to upgrade to .NET 3.5 to get that sweet routing engine!

    page_classes = {
        'sitemap.xml'       : forms.google_sitemap.GoogleSitemap,
        'sitemap.xml.gz'    : forms.google_sitemap.GoogleSitemap,
        'index.html'        : forms.blog.BlogSummaryForm,
        'photos/index.html' : forms.photos.PhotosForm,
        'register/index.html'   :forms.user_registration.UserRegistrationForm,
    }

    regex_mapping = (
        ('^rss/(.*)$',                                  rss_feeds.RSSFeedForm),
        ('^photos/(.*?)/(.*?)/index.html$',             forms.photos.PhotosForm),
        ('^photos/(.*?)/index.html$',                   forms.photos.PhotosForm),
        ('^([^/]+?)/index.html$',                       forms.blog.BlogListingForm),
        ('^([^/]+?)/(\d+)/index.html$',                 forms.blog.BlogPostForm),
        ('^([^/]+?)/create/blog/index.html',            forms.blog.BlogPostForm),
        ('^([^/]+?)/create/page/index.html',            forms.defined.DefinedContentForm),
        ('^([^/]+?)/(.+)$',                             forms.defined.DefinedContentForm),
    )

    # Page for which we have an associated class
    c = db.cursor()
    if page in page_classes.keys():
        app.register_page(page, page_classes[page](page))
    else:

        for (page_regex, page_class) in regex_mapping:
            m = re.match(page_regex, page)
            if m:
                app.register_page(page, page_class(page, *m.groups()))
                break
        else:
            app.register_page(page,forms.default.DefaultForm(page))

And if I'm not using LINQ to SQL, I'm going to have some horribly messy data access code, with SQL queries stuck all over my codebehinds!

        blog_table = models.BlogTable(ctx.request.db, ctx.request.auth.authorized and ctx.request.auth.user['auth_id'] or 0)

        ctx.locals.Paging = site_lib.Paging( ctx.locals.current_page, blog_table.get_record_count(locked_filter=locked_filter) )
        ctx.locals.Paging.change_page(ctx)
        ctx.locals.BlogPosts = blog_table.get_record_list(limit=ctx.locals.Paging.get_sql_limit(),
                                                          offset=ctx.locals.Paging.get_sql_offset(),
                                                          locked_filter=locked_filter)

Don't forget that I need good AJAX support!

And gorrammit, my website is nothing if it isn't in the cloud!

OK, that's enough sarcasm for now. I'm not saying my code is perfect, or that these trends hitting ASP.NET don't matter, or that I was ahead of the curve anywhere along the line. And I'm certainly not saying we all need to live like hermits--especially when it comes to code that isn't a personal project. (Imagine trying to find someone else to maintain my SnakeSkin/Python-powered blog.) But what I am saying is that I find all this bleeding edge stuff somewhat tiring. I don't really have fun hacking around with new stuff unless there's a point to it--I'm happiest when I'm producing something useful, stable, maintainable, and polished.

So .NET is a great choice for a work environment, where I may have to reuse libraries or work with an industry-standard platform. And I'm sure there are a number of "better" web frameworks out there (depending on how you define better: support, maintainability, strict adherence to design patterns, etc.). And in both cases, you can do some pretty awesome stuff with the wealth of libraries and the new stuff that's being released--of course, that's assuming you actually need to use it. (That last part is important. I look at things like Azure and Live Mesh and I see extremely useful technologies--but I also see technologies that people are going to shoehorn into so many applications where they're not really needed, just because they're the new hotness.)

At some point, you have to separate yourself from the kool-aid and the cult of personality and the horrible feeling that you're not up to snuff because you don't use [insert hip technology here], and realize that good enough really is by definition good enough^*. And if you don't have the willpower to stop excessively worrying about it on your own volition, then there are ways to deal with it indirectly.

^* I picked up this phrase at DevLink, and now I can't stop saying it. I use it partly as a joke (at least I hope I do), because it seems programmers these days are all about mantras like this. Yes, I realize that if someone else were using it as much as I have, I would be a little annoyed and burnt-out on it. Then again, I actually do like it: it speaks directly to the nagging feeling I have (and it's not just limited to my career) that whatever I do is never quite good enough.

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