Programming Pauls of Wisdom

too RAD for me

is that there is this huge class of problems people are solving that are all "the need to build a database-driven website".
http://blog.ianbicking.org/theres-so-much-more-than-rails.html

People do want to build database driven websites.
People do want to have RAD tools to help them.
But php, or Rails, or Python or J2EE, will not help, no clever web framework will prevent someone who knows nada about database design screwing it up and delivering somethig terrible.

I just spent 2 days cleaning up a php application, that had as its worst crime (and it is a long rap sheet that has earned it a death sentence, delayed for now) that each time one adds a customer, one creates a new set of three tables, copying over data from the original. Yup - each new customer is not an INSERT operation but CREATE TABLE.

This is the worst idea I have come across, but frequently I have patched up other badly thought out schema (or is it schemata?) and, strangely enough although php is usually a partner in crime, python has been caught at the scene too.

My take - do not worry overly about the framework, worry about the programmer.

Of course *I* need to decide on a framework too....

posted by paul @ 3:54 PM