My Web Development Stack Story Part 2: Before I got MEAN

I've been calling myself a Web Developer since who knows when, and it never clicked in me until recently that I should have been more specific on what kind of web development technology I'm actually into.

In the 20 years since doing web development, one of the frustrations I encounter time and again is discovering and catching up with the latest web tools that are out there, especially frameworks. Before the rampant practice of RESTful services, there were a whole slew of PHP frameworks that came out, and it was the choice of developers who wanted dynamic interactions on their websites while using a tool that has a very low learning curve and is affordable to deploy.

People hated JavaScript for a whole bunch of reasons I know but will never understand. So there were many attempts by many people to prove that JavaScript is dead or should die.

By the way, you'll love this talk by Gary Bernhardt on the history (and comical futuristic view) of JavaScript. Oh, the nostalgic Win 95 and Netscape Navigator 2 -- those were my dev jams!

Then in the late 2000s suddenly there were all these talk about RESTful and AJAX and DHTMLs and, in combination with some CSS hacks, the front-end Web became amazingly "light-weight"... and it was the dawn of a new Web era. I had to put light-weight in quotes, because what actually happened was that, in reality, websites used JavaScript tricks to lazy-load the increasingly bloated web pages. jQuery led the pack by being the ultimate JS library to do all those cool nasty stuff. It was so cool that soon not a single web site was devoid of jQuery, and it was so nasty because the Web was starting to break; slightly older browsers with less JavaScript support would see bungled up interfaces (RIP Internet Explorer) and the websites could sometimes even freeze up a computer!

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Web developers are nasty people.

JavaScript is just too C-like. Have you learnt C programming? Because it's freaking easy to learn, everyone loves C. Naturally people would love JavaScript, too. nodeJS, a server-side JavaScript interpreter that is packaged and can be installed on a web server, started to emerge seemingly out of nowhere. Server-side JavaScript?! Did I just went back to 1998??

My journey into MEAN stack development crept up quietly. I never took it seriously, partly because I was already developing with a somewhat MEAN-style technique (lazy loading only when needed, JSONing on just the required data). Another part was that I was still very engrossed with WordPress development.

That is, until 2015. I'll go into that next time.

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Part 1: How I Got Into LAMP

LIKE WHAT YOU READ? Then check out my previous post: https://steemit.com/online/@webgrrrl/looks-can-be-deceiving-online