When Web UI Component Frameworks like ASP.NET WebForms and JSF were invented in the early years of this decade, they were an honest attempt to bring an additional layer of abstraction to the web. This layer was supposed to improve a couple of things, especially in the areas of usability, developer productivity, extensibility and out-of-the-box features. They were also created to attract the old guard of desktop developers, that spend so many years to learn and master their craft.

To accomplish that mission, these frameworks were composed of hundreds of invisible components to form a feature-rich environment based on abstraction and simulation. This environment targeted one specific thing: hiding away as much of the original web infrastructure as possible. To accomplish that goal, Microsoft, Sun and others created complex workarounds to overcome some of the “serious limitations” of the web. Those features were given fancy names like Postback, ViewState and CodeBehind, which we all know and have to live with every day.

The problem with these techniques is that they are not only an additional layer of abstraction, they are actually based on some quite different paradigms. At some point that inevitably creates major problems if you want to create “real” web applications and you find yourself searching for solutions to problems that you might not even have if you hadn’t started to use those frameworks in the first place.

When some developers began to realize that these heavy-weight component-oriented frameworks started to decrease their productivity, they did a very clever thing. Instead of reverting completely back to old frameworks like the original Struts or ASP, they took all the great things that the Web UI Component Frameworks had brought to light, merged them with those frameworks and included new techniques and approaches that emerged over the last few years. The result of these efforts are frameworks like ASP.NET MVC, Ruby on Rails, Grails and Spring MVC that handle requests on the server-side much more naturally and effectively, and frameworks like JQuery, ASP.NET AJAX, Silverlight, Flex and Prototype, that handle user interaction on the client-side.

The way of web development has changed and as I wrote in my post about this topic about a year ago, it’s time to rethink now. Don’t miss this one, it is a big one.