Stability of web development packages?

Question

Well this migh get urgent soon. My experiences with web-frameworks was that they are relative "unstable". Not that they crash but that there are quite a few changes which then force one to reprogram ones code. I wonder what web developement packages you've used and how much work it was/is to maintain that code...

Answer 1

"Changes are a part of the requirement."

I dont think that the web packages that we design changes a lot. If it changes, then it is a bad design. If we use external API's, a very few get deprecated, otherwise most of them are the same.

Some packages used as a JAVA/J2EE programmer: - MVC - Struts - few AJAX frameworks

These are very basic one used. Most the other ones are self developed and once the design of the web package is done, we don't change the design.

Answer 2

Any library which is under active development would be unstable. Look at .NET for example, every month there's a new better way to do old stuff. On the other hand open source libraries tend more to throw old deprecated methods away because it makes code better and that's what makes them happy.

But I wouldn't recommend to use anything old and unsupported anyway, you'll be on your own although the environment would be completely stable.

The best way possible seems to be just freeze the version of library you start using and switch to new one only there's huge benefit in doing so. At least that's how everyone is doing that.

Answer 3

Frameworks like .NET and jQuery have been largely backward compatible and allows you to use new features slowly.

Mootools however... the API broke so many things from 1.11 to 1.2 to 1.3. Upgrading was not straightforward in that case.

As a rule, I try to wait for something to be out of beta before embracing it in production code. An endorsement can go a long way too - since Microsoft has called jQuery the winner of client-side frameworks its been easy to encourage others to pick it up too.

Answer 4

Most of my experience is with Ruby on Rails, so I'll share what I've seen with it over the last few years.

Rails updates at a pretty good clip, but you don't really need to update unless you need features or the rare security patch. As an example, I have a rails app running in our company right now that was coded about 2.5 years ago that only needed to have some work done to it once this year to upgrade it to a new version to be compatible with apache mod_rails, it was originally written against Rails 1.2 I believe. Of course, that was an intranet app which didn't have any security requirements. All in all, it's been pretty pain free. If I had kept using mongrel + mod_proxy it wouldn't have only needed to be updated once for a security patch.

Rails is pretty secure, vulnerabilities are fairly far between. There have been a few more Ruby vulnerabilities than Rails vulnerabilities if memory serves me right, but all in all it's pretty solid, and upgrading your ruby shouldn't break rails, especially if you use a distro that backports security fixes.