I started my programming career in 1995 working on applications written in C for engineering applications. Over the years C changed to Java and Java changed to web application development. I also had extensive experience building Oracle applications in PLSQL. In 2004 I worked on one of the world's largest Web based Property Management System serving over 6000 hotels both in the United States and internationally. At this time many of our customers were still using satellite based internet so low bandwidth, and minimum round trips were essential. During this employment we tried about every framework and paradigm imaginable. In fact we wrote our own version of a json based thick client before Angular even existed. All of our experimentation finally settled on a single most efficient solution, both performance wise and labor wise. This solution involved using ajax calls along with the browser supported innerHTML function to render pages in part instead of refreshing the entire page. However, like many companies our solutions were piecemeal and inconsistent throughout the application. Some pages refreshed in whole, other pages used Ajax, some pages used a json thick client approach. Since our application evolved over 10 years it had a little bit of everything in it. We even experimented with Ember and Angular.

Later after moving on in my career I joined organizations that were Angular shops, Java Server Faces shops (JSF), Spring MVC shops. The more I tried other paradigms the more I become convinced there was nothing faster to produce results in and more intuitive than Single Page Application (SPA) development assisted by ajax/async calls. In fact, no other paradigm performed faster in the browser either. Full page refresh loads a lot more html every transaction, and are very difficult to program even the simplest use case in, such as consistent behavior when pressing the browser back button. Json solutions such as Angular grind through 1000's of lines of javascript in the browser, which without very careful programming results in overly chatty (lots of round trips) sluggishly performing applications. Furthermore, the Angular javascript stack has become massive, brittle, and very esoteric. Each version of Angular seems to get more complicated and more proprietary.

On the other hand, writing web applications using HTML injection with Ajax made me feel like Tom Cruise in Minority Report whipping around holograms. It was completely liberating, so I decided to take everything I had learned and create a framework base that would make using this paradigm easy for everyone. A framework which would fit nicely into any web application and work smoothly against any server side MVC engine. You can use struts1, strut2, SpringMVC, ASP, PHP, or anything you want to that will deliver dynamic HTML to the browser. Having the WebAPI client side will massively reduce the number of mappings your create, and make the browser behave the way the user expects it to. The back button will work, and preserving user entered search criteria is the default without extra effort. HTML and CSS can be maximized without worrying about how this will interact with overcomplicated frameworks such as Angular. You will liberate your Web Designer too, because they can work in straight HTML again. The benefits are enormous but only a really seasoned web developer will appreciate this by imagining it. Everyone else will have to give it a try. My only warning is that you will have trouble tolerating any of the other paradigms out there afterward. Once you have been free, it will be hard to go back.

Well, I won't spend too much time on this because that is what LinkedIn is for. I have 30 years of development experience and I'm at that level of experience where I don't care what the fashion trend in Web Development is. I have seen it all and there are only so many paradigms possible. I wouldn't spend all this time on a framework if I didn't believe in it, and I am not supported by Google or Facebook so this thing has to become popular on its own merit. I am also into growing fruit trees. Check out that site too if you like. Thanks for reading and enjoy your web development. It's fun.

Matthew Keller on LinkedIn

Matthew Keller Gardening Website - Phoenix Tropicals