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Actually, from your basic set of requirements, you just feature creeped your design to death. Let me take a shot at it: Learn enough HTML to make a GET request. Know enough PHP to receive the GET request, and then update a textfile of entries on disk. Use a second file to store the top ten clicks. Return the second text file. Thats it. In your example, you did what is generally expected of today's current "web trends": you take a super simple use case, and demand it be highly scalable for millions of users with instant and immediate feedback. And why are we using CSS at all? Its a button and some text, no styling is needed. And why are we using a database? Do you expect millions of concurrent users? Hundreds? Your requirements didn't say that. What do you mean package/deploy/whatever to the server? Sure, there are some basic routing needs and maybe Apache, but those take minutes or less to setup. Also, right in the middle of your solution, you changed the requirement "If I want the interface to update immediately...", right there, you are adding complexity. While at the face of it, I understand what you are trying to say, but I have to point out that you are the primary cause of the increase of complexity, not the technologies involved. I actually think deploying a simple counter website like this is easy. But as soon as you want immediate feedback? Alright, more complexity. Millions of stored records? Alright maybe some large memory cache, like Memcache (or a large array). Persistent records? Alright, fine, get a DB. Millions of concurrent users? Alright, we are going to need some more complexity to handle throttling. Thousands of requests per second? Even more complexity, maybe we have a distributed system. In the end, you took a simple problem, and turned it into an awfully complex one. Yes, designing an application for that kind of load is complex, because it is actually a complex task. Doing all the things we want to do today is hard because there isn't some turn key solution, not because we are working with tools that are too complex. As an unfair little poke at your solution, there are in fact turn-key solutions, like Yahoo webhosting, where you just design really high level basics and it does the rest. Feature creep is bad. Identify it, and kill it. |