Computer Helper In Michigan

Change is the major topic of the USA presidential election process. It’s always the big topic. People always want some sort of “change”, when it comes to politics. When it comes to IT though, depending upon where you work, change happens very slowly in big companies, while the smaller, successful businesses nimbly pick up all the latest technologies.

Currently, I work at a company that is using an ancient PHP framework that existed long before CakePHP. AJAX wasn’t even a glimmer in anyone’s eyes, when this framework was released. Yet, I went forward with my first project and slowly developed a nice, AJAX powered GUI for one of our applications that was otherwise very unwieldy to use. Four months of development went into it. The other developer of the department noted that it could have been completed in half the time if I just stuck to using PHP.

I think while his argument would have been justified if this was holding up a function of our company, but it was not. Plus, I believe it was worth taking the extra time to develop a more perfect application, instead of dishing out the garbage the users are accustomed to seeing all the time. So I guess his argument was that the applications should have a cohesiveness to them. Sure, I agree with this, but as I see it, we’re going to have a struggle between applications I do, using the AJAX framework ( EXtJS ), and the applications he does, which are straightforward PHP with no thought of adding AJAX to them. I would rather meet him in the middle at this point, but sometime down the road, I would like to see him on board, using AJAX in a majority of his applications, rather than “rarely ever”. It is a skill web application developers need to have in this day and age in order to be competitive with applications that would otherwise be developed in ASP or Cold Fusion.

Anyway, my point - if there is time to make an application beautiful and perfect for the user, use that time and don’t rush the development. It will be time well spent, even if you have to learn as you go. If your employer decides to fault you because of it, don’t worry - there are plenty of other employers who would love to have your skills on board and you can apply your experience to their projects.