In essence, web development these days doesn’t start with a blank document but with downloading an SDK or entering your application data in some web app to get a developer key. In other words using a system that is much larger than anything you’d ever have done yourself. This concept is very hard to swallow for us battle-hardened masters of the command line and I myself have problems getting enthusiastic about using a chunk of ‘hello world’ code and turning it into something great.

If we look at it logically, however, and leave our ego to go and play in the garden for a while it’s clear that there are many valid reasons to use SDKs and hosted development environments. It’s exactly the same thing we do as clever developers build ourselves shortcuts, hack our development tools or assemble our very own library of snippets - in order to avoid having to do the same things over and over again.

Using SDKs and hosted development environments shouldn’t mean your work will be dumbed down or that people won’t respect you as a developer. It means that they are helping to take the pain away and have taken away the hoops that they jumped through so that you can just build something interesting without worrying about the underlying architecture, security of the system or its performance.

Abstracting these away means you can easily do fixes or improvements should the need occur and boy will it occur. It is not fun to maintain a site or a server these days. The amount of people that want to hack you and inject malicious code is staggering and their skills are impressive. The only way to battle these threats is to have one system to fix not millions of little applications.

Abstraction also means that many more people can start developing applications. Geeks build geek tools, designers build designer tools, if you lower the entry barrier to developing, all groups can bring their expertise to play with the system and subsequently you can build really cool tools together. Of course, there is a lot of pointless and bad work being done too (no, I don’t want your teddy bear to travel on Facebook or catch dozens of sheep) but that’s like saying HTML is bad because people can use tables and fonts to create layouts fast instead of using CSS.

Via ThinkVitamin

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