The limits of my language are the limits of my world

In my last couple of posts, I described the web and how it is built. The reason for this is to introduce the web to non-web developers - primarily Windows ones, as Windows developers "see" the world differently from web developers. This is as a result of the underlying operating environment.

I am about to make some massive generalisations for the purposes of illustrative clarity.

Windows developers tend to see things in terms of "objects", "containers" and "references" which all communicate via "events" that are raised and responded to. Web developers tend to see things in terms of "resources", "relations" and "links" which all communicate via "messages" that are sent and received.

Windows developers "create new objects" where web developers "post resources". This may all be argued to be a case of "You say tomato", but they represent fundamental differences between traditional Windows development and web development.

An "event" is an abstraction that performs poorly on the web. A windows developer new to web development will see an event in a way that is appropriate to windows development, but if you deal with events in a web application the same way you deal with events in a windows application, you will run in to trouble. However, If you see don't see an event, but a pair of messages, you can store, edit, copy, cache and queue a message. If you think of things in terms of events, it's difficult conceptually to get your head around the idea of a "cached event".

This mismatch of understanding between non-distributed and distributed development results in the famous "Fallacies of Network Computing".

These fallacies are a list of flawed assumptions made by programmers when first developing web, or in fact any distributed, applications.

They are...

1. The network is reliable.
2. Latency is zero.
3. Bandwidth is infinite.
4. The network is secure.
5. Topology doesn't change.
6. There is one administrator.
7. Transport cost is zero.
8. The network is homogeneous.

Over the next few posts I will explain these incorrect assumptions, the problems they have caused (and continue to cause) for people new to web development, and the considerations, patterns and constructs that should be taken in to account to work around or overcome them.