Dying tools for website development

Question

Website development is expanding in complexity, popularity and in the amount of tools available to use for development.

Magazines, forums and such are now and then asking this same question, but not often with the possibility or means for collecting trustworthy answers. I figure this community might be able to at least reveal tendencies within the area.

So, are there any individual tools or full technology stacks used today for website development which can be regarded as "dying"? For what reason? What are the consequences?

EDIT: A close-vote. Would appreciate a comment clarifying what's wrong with the post..

Answer 1

Programming with LAMP where the P is Perl. I know several shops who are moving from tools like Mason to Django. (including a large newspaper in Iceland)

Answer 2

old-school CGI, anything with a cgi-bin/ directory

Answer 3

Technologies whose support mechanisms - vendors or community - are not responsive enough for your needs, over the entire lifetime of your application, are ones that you should avoid.

It doesn't matter if the technology is "dead" as long as it's still meeting your needs; the deciding factor should be whether you anticipate having problems getting bugs fixed and/or questions answered.

Answer 4

Dreamweaver used to be the golden child of web development. Now, you pretty much only see it in use at exclusively graphic design houses where they are responsible for little of the interactive development. Coldfusion, in that respect, is also waning: I think you would have to be crazy at this point in time to use it in light of more powerful and better supported open source alternatives.

This is going to get me murdered, but I think Ruby on Rails has dropped off in use in the last few months. The speed concerns and lack of scalability built-in have finally shown through as projects built on it gained popularity and inevitably cracked under the pressure. I don't think it will disappear, but it will have to become a little more agile and less dependent on its huge stack of requirements in order to stick.

Answer 5

Classic ASP is dying if not dead if you consider it a separate product from asp.net. It's still in use but it's been a long time since I've heard anyone use it for a new project. Some people may argue Cold Fusion is in the same boat, but at least CF is being updated.

There are a lot of dead or dying tools. Web Matrix the free asp.net ide is pretty much dead. I think it was the precursor to Visual Web Developer used to see what asp.net developers wanted in an editor and was never really a full-fledged product.

VRML? I think that is a pretty much dead technology. I still see sites about it but have not heard of anyone using it outside of 1999.

Director? I like to think that Director is dying when the web is concerned. Flash has taken over as the RIA technology of choice.

For the most part I think when something "dies" it's because it is replaced by something better. The consequence is that it gets harder to use the old technologies and if things change too fast it is difficult to keep things updated.