Funktastic Programming Adventures in Web Development

Here at work we have very little standards as far as “good coding practices” or general guidelines for architecting our web applications. Everyone pretty much does what they want to. This causes all sorts of headaches when someone else (namely me) has to go in and use their code or add on an additional feature.

As an example, one of our coders has decided that they wanted to do a totally object-oriented approach to ASP (Active Server Pages) programming and place everything in class objects. Every query from the database is parsed and stored in a class or even a dictionary (hashtable) of classes. After which, we can begin doing the real work on the page.

Don’t get me wrong! I am all for object-oriented programming and understand the benefits it can offer, but ASP has such weak support for OOP that the benefits aren’t really worth the extra time it takes to program pages that way. It is just a lot of extra code that takes more of my time to maintain. Maybe our programmer here is looking forward to the day when we convert all of our ASP web pages into Dot NET. Either that or they just like to see the “auto-completion” feature in Visual Studio .NET.