
There's gotta be a better way of programming web applications - hoodoof
Much of the task of building a web application is fetching data and sending it through a pipeline of software to eventually get to the user, and conversely getting the data from the user and sending it back through a pipeline of software to return in the database.<p>The pipeline consists of apis and interfaces and transformations and validations and authentications and authorizations and sdks and data stores&#x2F;databases.  These take the form of database fields, HTTP APIs web browser input and output components, bits of business logic that transform and make decisions - basically everything that goes to make up an application.<p>So much of programming is setting the expected ins and outs of each step, and so much debugging is fixing it where the expected ins and outs are wrong.<p>Surely there has to be a better way that, in a unified and universally programmable way, allows the programmer to assemble a data flow, align the expected input and output fields and specify which bits of code run them.<p>Does this exist?  Or are there projects headed in this direction?  It&#x27;s just silly to be writing code that essentially is dealing with connecting data inputs and outputs together.<p>I&#x27;m not talking about something that dumbs it down for end users, like the well regarded IFFT, but a new and sophisticated approach to programming that is oriented primarily toward defining end to end data flows through sophisticated applications and data stores.<p>Maybe some sort of universal component that defines data in and out and people write connectors so any and every bit of software talks to it. Good idea, stupid idea?
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blackflame7000
There are innumerable frameworks that can help with certain aspects of the
transport chain but I don't believe there is a one stop shop Webapp IDE.
Netbeans has a ton of features and you can pretty much build the entire
DB->Server->Client architecture with it. However, there is still a lot left to
the programmer.

If you are a java programmer, you can use Hibernate to manipulate sql with
java objects, and spring to translate those java objects into
JavaBeans/JSF/JSP for display in the browser. That helps cut down on the
number of adapter classes you need to write by hand.

If you use other languages, I would recommend standardizing your messages to
json since there are a lot of libraries out there for handling it during
various stages of your communication chain.

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hoodoof
I'm not talking about the IDE, but at the application layer.

Kinda like chaining together unix commands via pipes but instead chaining
together back end and front end components.

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kunashe
This is an interesting idea - especially the idea of application layers as
pipes.

It strikes me that these pipes "partially execute" \- I suppose if you can
characterize the types of partial executions, you could define the application
in a generic way.

