[HacktionLab] RAD ~= collaborative != (Well Designed | Well Programmed) [was: Rails girls]

[ekes]

On 31/05/13 09:44, Mick - Clearerchannel wrote:
> On 5/30/2013 11:49 AM, Mike Harris wrote:
>>  am not a massive fan of Rails, but that's from being from a
>> non-RAD background.  These web tools can mean that people develop web
>> apps quickly that aren't actually that well designed or programmed, or
>> easy to maintain.   It's a similar situation with PHP in general and
>> with Drupal I think.
> 
> I guess using these kinds of frameworks have advantages and disadvantages.
> 
> Disadvantages, you have to keep on top of security upgrades, you need to
> watch out for conflicting code contributed by different authors, you
> need to buy in to a methodology.
> But you get the advantages of being part of a community effort so you
> don't have to write your own code for every single thing your web app
> does and you take advantage of the fact that there is a community
> testing for security flaws as well.

Building on the shoulders of giants it turns out is actually re-using
lots of code written by hundreds of other people. This means dealing
with ugly legacy, it means disagreement. It also means agreement, lots
of peoples ideas and skills, understanding nutters and geniuses alike.

It's actually an interesting discussion. You need to have some handle on
the technical; but it's actually a social question:-

Can consensus discussion and collaborative programming ever be well
designed or well programmed? Discuss.

A couple of those technical random starting points for the afore
mentioned PHP & Drupal:-

Pragmatic and complex design, collaboratively worked out, a small part
of the Web Services initiative in Drupal:
https://groups.drupal.org/node/237443 (June 2012) which then leads to
https://drupal.org/node/1540656
Pretty? Well designed? Well programmed? Just solving the problems? Or
building unnecessary complexity?
Participatory? Democratic? Collaborative?

Co-ordination and community http://www.php-fig.org/faq/ with discussions
as
https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/php-fig/Y4xc71Q3YEQ
and
https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/php-fig/lANQM7LPX_M
ending up with (disputed and still discussed) stuff like
http://www.php-fig.org/psr/0/ but also
https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/php-fig-cs/mN13VKUOhVQ
Pretty? Well designed? Well programmed? Just solving the problems? Or
building unnecessary complexity?
Participatory? Democratic? Collaborative?

Cheers, ekes