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Phil Duffy phil-at-bearingasset.com |nyphp dev/internal group use| wrote:

> I am sorry if this question appears to be off-topic, but perhaps 
> someone can refer me to the correct forum.  I had programmed in 
> approximately a dozen languages previously before dabbling in PHP a 
> couple years ago.  Now that PHP 5 is truly object-oriented, I find it 
> to be the most powerful of the languages with which I am familiar.  As 
> remarkable as the Web is, I am coming to the conclusion that it has 
> some severe limitations for the kinds of complex applications that 
> were the standard in the client/server days.  I know that going back 
> to client/server is not the answer and suspect that somewhere someone 
> is working on an Internet-based system that could ultimately replace 
> the page-oriented Web.  Can anybody point me in that direction?
>
Whatever works will replace the web, one piece at a time. Just because 
people didn't understand how free information (truthful or not) would 
change their lives (and so they adopted the web), people don't know what 
else they need, either. Somebody has to show it to them (one piece at a 
time).

It seems you are saying you want to build complex applications, and 
don't think PHP/web is a good way to do that. Seems clear. But if you 
are trying to bring those complex apps to the people, people are (right 
now) using the web.

> My primary concern with the Web is that it seems to be a force-fit of 
> page-orientation and statelessness to structured programming/object 
> orientation, which I find to be inherently task-oriented.  
> Applications that depend heavily upon related records require that 
> users perform all kinds of browses.  Under those circumstances, 
> managing communication among objects becomes a nightmare because it 
> requires the application programmer to predict communication paths to 
> objects and manually handle session variables that are not task-scoped 
> (they are by definition, session-scoped).  It appears to me that there 
> is a role for session variables, but it is not the task.
>
Yes, doing it that way is hard. Much harder than it looks. Harder than 
people think it is. But it is also hard to travel around as a salesman, 
pitching Ginzu knives at mall cooking kiosks, flea markets, and Wal-mart 
stores 300 days per year. But somebody does that, and I met one guy who 
made a million bucks doing that in one year. All we see is some guy at 
the mall giving a great demo of a cheap knife cutting through a coke 
can. We have no idea how much work he does to bring that show around... 
and I doubt we care very much. As soon as he has a better way to cut out 
the middle man and keep 80% of his sales,  I'm sure he'll choose that 
method.

> The force-fit described above is particularly apparent when 
> programming in an MVC and validate/process/display workflow 
> environment.  While many programmers have reservations about the need 
> for these disciplines, it has been my experience that they become 
> increasingly important as the size and complexity of an application 
> system increases.
>
I think you're seeing programmers (technicians) relying on tools (which 
they have to do, to keep up). "The best tool for the job" , is sometimes 
really "the best avalable tool for the job, as the customer understands 
the job". As you know, there is a difference.

> Any thoughts will be appreciated.
>
You got em.

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