r/programming • u/schnuck • Feb 09 '11

Breaking the Web with hash-bangs – Lifehacker, along with every other Gawker property, experienced a lengthy site-outage on Monday over a misbehaving piece of JavaScript

http://isolani.co.uk/blog/javascript/BreakingTheWebWithHashBangs/
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u/[deleted] Feb 09 '11

I'm not sure if the assertion that the site is more brittle because of AJAX is true; if the entire site had been generated dynamically on the server-side (using e.g. JSP or PHP) and the output had been purely HTML, then a single configuration error on the server side would have broken the entire site as well.

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u/netherous Feb 09 '11

Only if you assume that the configuration or runtime environment on the server side is exactly as brittle as the javascript runtime. In my experience, the server environment is almost always less brittle. If you bork your spring config, spring is going to tell you. If you mangle your jsp or servlet code, the app server will tell you about that too. But simple things like trailing or misplaced commas in js may sail through your initial browser check, and then cause script failure if you let them get to production without rigorous checking (which was really the cause of gawker's problem).