Sometimes I don’t know whether to laugh or to cry. I have found that over the past few years, the solution to many people’s problems is one word: Controls. I’m not trying to say that controls are a bad thing, but when managers start sayings things like: “but can’t you just get a control for that?”, or, “yeah, so the screen will be like this, we wack a control, here, and here, and there, and we’ll download some control online and put it here”; it makes me burst into tears laughing, and it’s definitely not managers only, I’ve had developers say this to me as well (clearly, these guys were backend developers, I’ll go into more detail about how you determine this in a future post).
If only development was so easy, then the process of developing a solution will be something along the lines of this (in fact, I think it’s what most managers want in the future):
- Gather Requirements
- Determine Required Controls
- Drag and Drop Controls
- Configure Controls
- Test and Deploy Solution.
Don’t get me wrong, I use controls, but it’s definitely not the first thing I head to when developing a solution, mainly because of a variety of factors:
- May only require 1% of what the control does.
- Cost factors.
- Control (no pun intended), I tend to like a bit more control of things, I know some vendors provide source, but not all.
- Learning curve, this depends, I’ve dealt with some nice controls in the past, which took little time to grasp.
- I like to learn how to make things, I’m sure everyone does as well.
I’m a Javascript developer and definitely agree with you.
I hate it when people who only know how to use jQuery plugins call themselves Javascript developers.
I also find myself having to write most of my own jQuery plugins, often finding the current ones out there lacking in functionality or simply not do what I want it to do.