Whenever other people stop needing web pages that save to a database. Until then, we'll continue learning better (as in quicker and easier rather than "new") ways to lazily create what people need.
I'd argue in a lot of cases the new methods are not significantly better, just significantly different.
I cynically believe that this is what happens when you ask a reasonably intelligent programmer to connect forms to databases. They will get bored and invent alternate techniques and want to use 'new' tools to pretty much achieve the same thing.
I'm guilty of doing this myself, but I now see the pattern and I'm over it. There is more interesting things to learn than the 'next hot thing' in web tech and there's also something to be said about maintainability.
I've had to troubleshoot bugs in years old Rails applications on Ruby 1.8.7 in Rails 2.1 that were jam packed full of the current trendy plugins of the time. I'm telling you I'd prefer debugging and maintaining a boring old PHP app with hand-rolled SQL statements over it any day. To be fair these apps are still around because they generate income, but they don't generate enough income to justify a 3-6 month long error-prone 'upgrade' project to get it inline with the tech of the day.
I think this is why big-co standardise on years old tech, because building every new thing in every new tech with 1000 programmers is a recipe for disaster. Yes we need to try new tools, new techniques, but when overwhelmingly the corporate world have chosen the safe route I suspect it's not because they're old and boring themselves, just they've seen through the smoke and mirrors and no longer buy it.
It takes a number of years working in a few environments to see this for yourself (try telling this to an 18 year old hot-shot and they'll think you're an old fuddy duddy). I believe there's merit when an old greybeard is yelling at all the younguns because they left out not null constraints and omitted foreign keys. They know (and have dealt with) the impact a few years down the track.
> They will get bored and invent alternate techniques and want to use 'new' tools to pretty much achieve the same thing.
Yup, and plenty of re-invented alternatives will be no better or worse than the tried and true. But occasionally the new tech will be significantly better; that's how tech evolves.
The main advantage I expect to get from experimenting with node.js and NoSQL is to be able to take the client-side code that's on the web page (eg instant form validation with javascript, and saving offline to html5 localStorage because the customer wants it to work where they don't have wifi), and re-use it on the server (would rather not have a second codebase in php or ruby-rails to do all the CRUD). With coffeescript I write less boilerplate. And I have to use the latest jQuery-esque plug-ins because the customer also wants touch-screen drag-n-drop functionality.
To be sure, there is plenty more interesting things I would rather be learning. But customers don't really care that I might find something else more interesting than their project.
It's not that they've seen through the smoke and mirrors; old projects have significant momentum. I never, ever want to hand-roll SQL statements ever again, unless I _really_ need to.
