I'm currently developing a web application for government land planning. The application runs mostly in the browser, using ajax to load and save data.
I will do the initial development, and then graduate (it's a student job). After this, the rest of the team will add the occasional feature as needed. They know how to code, but they're mostly land-planning experts.
Considering the pace at which Javascript technologies change, how can I write code that will still work 20 years from now? Specifically, which libraries, technologies, and design ideas should I use (or avoid) to future-proof my code?
Best Answer
Planning software for such a lifespan is difficult, because we don't know what the future holds. A bit of context: Java was published 1995, 21 years ago. XmlHttpRequest first became available as a proprietary extension for Internet Explorer 5, published 1999, 17 years ago. It took about 5 years until it became available across all major browsers. The 20 years you are trying to look ahead are just about the time rich web applications have even existed.
Some things have certainly stayed the same since then. There has been a strong standardization effort, and most browsers conform well to the various standards involved. A web site that worked across browsers 15 years ago will still work the same, provided that it worked because it targeted the common subset of all browsers, not because it used workarounds for each browser.
Other things came and went – most prominently Flash. Flash had a variety of problems that led to its demise. Most importantly, it was controlled by a single company. Instead of competition inside the Flash platform, there was competition between Flash and HTML5 – and HTML5 won.
From this history, we can gather a couple of clues:
Keep it simple: Do what works right now, without having to use any workarounds. This behaviour will likely stay available long into the future for backwards-compatibility reasons.
Avoid reliance on proprietary technologies, and prefer open standards.
The JavaScript world today is relatively volatile with a high flux of libraries and frameworks. However, nearly none of them will matter in 20 years – the only “framework” I'm certain that will still be used by then is Vanilla JS.
If you want to use a library or tool because it really makes development a lot easier, first make sure that it's built on today's well-supported standards. You must then download the library or tool and include it with your source code. Your code repository should include everything needed to get the system runnable. Anything external is a dependency that could break in the future. An interesting way to test this is to copy your code to a thumb drive, go to a new computer with a different operating system, disconnect it from the internet, and see whether you can get your frontend to work. As long as your project consists of plain HTML+CSS+JavaScript plus perhaps some libraries, you're likely going to pass.