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June 22, 2007
JavaScript scalability
JavaScript scalability: David Berlind has an anecdote about one Ajax developer estimating that a third of his production costs are in handling browser differences. It's odd that we don't see any aggregate metrics for this question... all we have are isolated anecdotes for the costs of the "spec-first, multiple implementation" approach. Here in 2007, HTML/JS adds very few extra costs for simple content, on which all browser behaviors have already converged. But pushing on the edges of JavaScript is harder, because the differences increase as you move closer to the edge. David closes with a straightforward observation, although he phrases it in a slightly bloodthirsty way: "It's no wonder developers love runtimes like Adobe's Flash for developing Rich Internet Applications (RIAs). Developers can work with a single codebase works across all browsers and Adobe is a single throat to choke if it doesn't work." Developing against multiple runtimes is a real cost, but I'm not sure there's enough evidence to say that it increases total production costs by 50%...?
Posted by JohnDowdell at June 22, 2007 02:35 PM
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Comments
Not sure about costs, but I agree 100% with his quote; that's why I develop for Flash Player. One third of my dev time to "ensuring my code works as expected"? Heck with that.
It's also easy to formulate brazen blog posts full of drama aimed squarely at Adobe for accountability purposes. Bitching about IE to Microsoft doesn't seem to have much effect.
Posted by: JesterXL at June 23, 2007 12:23 PM