I've had this feeling over the past couple months, and I'm just getting to the point of writing it down. I was talking to a friend I worked with on a project back in ’97 and it struck a chord - development is fun again.
Not to say I ever haven't enjoyed developing, but I think the "fun and cool stuff" is starting to mature and we're starting to see people making leaps with the technologies. For me things started going dark in the Fall of 1999. I was at WinDev West and everything just seemed to be repeating itself – the “tough issues” went from being real things we were trying to get our hands around with frenzied last minute presentation additions to glossy presentations delivered with feigned excitement. People assumed that because “Author X” compiled an “exhaustive list” of workarounds that we were all doomed to follow their suggestions. The groups of critical thinkers seemed to be on auto pilot. Worse yet, the ratio of conference groupies to real developers was on the rise – it was pretty obvious and frustrating.
I guess it went downhill before that. I actually attended a 3 day training seminar on MSMQ - the author taught everything there was to know about MSMQ short of revealing source code. Technically it was the most exhaustive review of a component I've ever seen. But 3 days on MSMQ? Perhaps this was a sign the world was coming to an end!
Back to WinDev... At that same conference, Don Box revealed the SOAP spec they had been working on and it was very cool. Part of the audience got it, but most sat there and went “huh?” Finally, something useful involving the web that didn’t require formatting tags! I think that spec carried me in new tech development until .NET hit. The following spring, I pushed for developing a SOAP-based application at a local Fortune 15 company. We had the thing up and running in no time. They didn’t understand what it was – only that the solution worked. They had the local Microsoft guys come in to look at it, and I remember them looking at it thinking “holy sh*t, somebody got this to work and it’s cool!” It’s funny because then the corporate IT types came in saying we should use “WebMethods” or some such tool, but the plants (who funded the operation) were unwilling to back their recommendation due to cost. We did it for free and subsequently the company’s Java people were struggling not only to understand their IBM/Apache/SOAP library – they were attempting to understand how things worked. The fact it was so simple made watching this entertaining and confirmed my beliefs around the “enterprise java” crew. I was laughing out loud when I read WebMethods later endorsed SOAP over their proprietary messaging structure .
Back then, I remember looking at web development and thinking to myself, “I didn’t get into this business to hard code a bunch of HTML tags and spew forth user interfaces in the web equivalent of printf.”
I did some protocol level development, library tools and Win32 fat-client work from ’99 until .NET came along. The ability to truly componentize working bits made this fun. And the integration of WebServices into the platform rocked. We built an application built entirely on webservices in the fall of 2002 in the supply chain space. The best part about this was everyone else in our space was using file transfers, batch processing or even worse, database replication services. We did it all with a configuration screen that simply asked for a plant name and a URL. Latency in supply-chain is absolutely killer, and WebServices gave us the edge noone else had.
So I guess I owe thanks to this person and this person. I suspect their work on the SOAP spec kept a few of us floating through the cold tech winter.