Computersight -

The more I research the best technologies to use on my capstone project, and the more I become an “open”(meaning open source) thinker, I start to wonder, does it mean that as the web opens its code up to the world, that coders and developers will become nothing more than construction workers, plugging together different snipits from application specific framework in order to create a smooth product.

As more framework technologies are developed to fill role specific gaps, at what point does the need to constantly re-invent the wheel stop. For example: for the for-mentioned project, I created a log in system using php and MySQL. The system didn’t take more than four or five hours to code and worked fairly well, but it was no where near the time and expertise that went into a code package I found. The package handled cookies, statistics, and roles. It was fairly simple to adjust for my application, and saved me a ton of time in tweaking and testing. It’s free and supported by the developer. This isn’t even a framework, its just a handful of php files that do the job needed.

Then there are frameworks like jQuery. This replace hundreds of lines of JavaScript with simple function calls, and sometime all that’s needed is one of the thousands of plug-ins that can be found in their repository. Also, google has a number of Ajax and jQuery api’s in there code site.

With all this code done for you, is there a need to redo it?  I sure don’t want to re-code everything I do. It was discouraging to discover there was free, better code out there for something I worked on. Is it better to take advantage of these resources and finish your projects quicker, smoother and have a more stable application, or is the pride that is involved in creating your own code what really drives a project. After incorporating these frameworks and other packages, it felt less like my project and more like a puzzle I picked up at Walgreen’s.

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