On the need for good tools

submitted by fschmidt from self.programming

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[–][deleted] 2 insightful - 2 fun2 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 2 fun -  (4 children)

Don't confuse development with stitching together libraries. I can't recall adding anything to out-of-the-box ASP.NET or PHP just to facilitate file upload.

Nginx is in a different category. A web server program is infrastructural and hard to avoid if you're doing web development. You have to identify that falls into this category and what falls into the other.

Those WYSIWYG libraries are universally awful, as you note. I'd look for some way to simplify my design if I were thinking of using any of that crap. Writing a minimalist non-insane, in-house TinyMCE replacement actually sounds like a blast. I love ripping out bullshit libraries like that and replacing them with my own code. JSON.net, RestSharp... removing them gives me a throbbing rage-boner.

[–]fschmidt[S] 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (3 children)

Of course file uploading is trivial and doesn't require a library. What I wanted was a service to store a large number of files in the cloud and make them accessible through the web. So this is a service, not a library.

I don't see much difference between libraries, services, and infrastructure. They all have the same issues.

I looked into writing my own WYSIWYG tool. It is no blast because it depends on contentEditable which is horribly designed. If you look at my goodjava library, you can see that have replaced almost all libraries on the server side. But in the nightmare world of modern Javascript, I would rather start with something that has already dealt with some of the horrors which is why I would start with SCEditor and go from there.

If you have replaced libraries with your own code, have you made any of this open source? I would love to see an existance proof that I am not alone on a planet of pure scum.

[–][deleted] 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

OK, that all sounds reasonable. Still kind of want to make my own non-insane WYSIWYG thing. I only vaguely remember contentEditable. I do recall it being far from a cure-all for, well, any real-world problem.

If you have replaced libraries with your own code, have you made any of this open source? I would love to see an existance proof that I am not alone on a planet of pure scum.

Usually when I do this I am 1) being paid to write proprietary code and 2) not trying to write a library. It's a little bit arrogant, IMO, to take the code you used to solve a problem and try to generalize it into The Way Everyone Should Parse JSON in C#TM (or whatever). And I don't want to "dox" myself with a Github link on a Reddit alternative LOL.

That said, I have a pretty extensive and well-tested math library out there under the GPL license, and a specialized compiler, and something that's designed to replace Crystal Reports or SSRS with something much smaller and different. I'm not too involved with web development per se, I guess.

[–]fschmidt[S] 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

It's a little bit arrogant, IMO, to take the code you used to solve a problem and try to generalize it into The Way Everyone Should Parse JSON in C#TM (or whatever).

Of course I did that.

[–][deleted] 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

I'm not much of a Java expert but that looks like useful, readable code. IDK if you'll ever gain the kind of architectural influence you want, but you seem like one of the "good guys."