You Want Technology with Warts

Summary

I normally skip presentations because I prefer reading, but Building the Hundred-Year Web Service (YouTube) was worth the time.1 Note that despite “htmx” featuring in the title, very little of the presentation is actually about htmx. It is about choosing and using technology in such a way that it won’t require maintenance suddenly due to external factors changing. That’s a drum I’ve been banging for the last few years too, although less visibly. Petros observes that we know how to build bridges that last hundreds of years: stone, concrete, and steel can all do this with the right engineering. We also know how to build hypertext that is likely to last at least a few decades: use plain html and css. But, Petros asks, how do we create database-y web services that lasts for decades? Where do we store the data? Where do we perform business logic? He answers thusly: sqlite for data storage, sql queries for most of the application logic, Express-on-Node.js for routing and presentation logic, Jinja2 templates for additional presentation logic, and html and vanilla js for triggering http requests. I won’t debate the specifics here. 2 I’d be tempted to jam Perl into the backend instead of Node.js if I wanted truly low maintenance. I have a feeling a Perl script is more likely to run unmodified 20 years from now than some Node.js thing. But maybe I’m wrong on this. But there were other nuggets in the presentation. For example: I’ve frequently wondered why I turn to the web browser when I want to make cross-platform software. There’s a chart in the presentation that shows how environmental churn and api deprecation leads desktop applications to have an expected lifetime of maybe a decade, and phone apps closer to a couple of years. On the other hand, simple web pages have worked unmodified for over 40 years! That’s a good reason to default to the web as a technology. When a page load is fast enough, the browser does not do the whole flicker-a-blank-page-before-doing-a-full-repa...