1. Language that doesn't require me to connect to the external system and use new brain-dead language to do such basic thing as persisting and efficiently accessing data. How do you declare persistent array of objects that you will be wanting to access by some of their properties in your favourite language without keeping the whole thing in RAM? I'd love to have my data stored in XML if I could query it without loading the whole file into memory and if I could hint it what XPaths I'll be accessing in the future so it can create some indexes to make those accesses faster.
2. Tool that I could use to convert photoshop design to sane subset of HTML and CSS and perhaps JavaScript without manually writing text documents all by hand. Dreamweaver is just set of buttons to click to insert tags and that's not what I mean. I think of something more like a GUI designer where I could load psd, or multiple psd-s and use them as a blueprint and source of bitmaps while creating a webpage. In MS Visual Studio GUI designer has a nice thing called Anchor. It allows you to anchor borders of your component at fixed distances from borders of it's parents. If people who defined HTML standards embraced that ideas then webdevelopment of recent 10 years would be flowers and bunnies instead of franticly searching how to make the browsers actually fill the height of the parent when you say "height: 100%" (hint: you can't).
3. Tool that could present me with graphical view of what components my webapp consists of and how they are connected. Something like database diagrams but for living breathing components. It's really tiring to making sense of what your app actually does just by looking through a small hole of the size of letters in the debugger and stack trace.
4. I'd like to see, while inspecting a method, all the places in my code where this method is surely called from and all the places this method might be called from (because of inheritance, function pointers, dynamic calls etc.). Function call is the connection between component. It's really nasty that when looking at source point of the connection then you can see the destination but when looking at destination you have no idea what are the source points.
What webdevelopment lacks in my opinion are just proper (visual) tools to deal with its complexity and inconveniences. Decade or two of this crap and you really are fed up because there are less and less interesting problems to solve and same drudgery over and over. Standard component interfaces would also be nice but unless you have a generally adopted tool that favours some standard there won't be any standard. Current state of the art web-development tool is text editor with syntax highlighting and auto-complete broken to various degrees. The only thing it favours is not keeping HTML, JavaScript and CSS inside strings because then it refuses to highlight it. It does the same thing about SQL but that really doesn't bother people enough because SQL is already lost cause.
1. Language that doesn't require me to connect to the external system and use new brain-dead language to do such basic thing as persisting and efficiently accessing data. How do you declare persistent array of objects that you will be wanting to access by some of their properties in your favourite language without keeping the whole thing in RAM? I'd love to have my data stored in XML if I could query it without loading the whole file into memory and if I could hint it what XPaths I'll be accessing in the future so it can create some indexes to make those accesses faster.
2. Tool that I could use to convert photoshop design to sane subset of HTML and CSS and perhaps JavaScript without manually writing text documents all by hand. Dreamweaver is just set of buttons to click to insert tags and that's not what I mean. I think of something more like a GUI designer where I could load psd, or multiple psd-s and use them as a blueprint and source of bitmaps while creating a webpage. In MS Visual Studio GUI designer has a nice thing called Anchor. It allows you to anchor borders of your component at fixed distances from borders of it's parents. If people who defined HTML standards embraced that ideas then webdevelopment of recent 10 years would be flowers and bunnies instead of franticly searching how to make the browsers actually fill the height of the parent when you say "height: 100%" (hint: you can't).
3. Tool that could present me with graphical view of what components my webapp consists of and how they are connected. Something like database diagrams but for living breathing components. It's really tiring to making sense of what your app actually does just by looking through a small hole of the size of letters in the debugger and stack trace.
4. I'd like to see, while inspecting a method, all the places in my code where this method is surely called from and all the places this method might be called from (because of inheritance, function pointers, dynamic calls etc.). Function call is the connection between component. It's really nasty that when looking at source point of the connection then you can see the destination but when looking at destination you have no idea what are the source points.
What webdevelopment lacks in my opinion are just proper (visual) tools to deal with its complexity and inconveniences. Decade or two of this crap and you really are fed up because there are less and less interesting problems to solve and same drudgery over and over. Standard component interfaces would also be nice but unless you have a generally adopted tool that favours some standard there won't be any standard. Current state of the art web-development tool is text editor with syntax highlighting and auto-complete broken to various degrees. The only thing it favours is not keeping HTML, JavaScript and CSS inside strings because then it refuses to highlight it. It does the same thing about SQL but that really doesn't bother people enough because SQL is already lost cause.