More than 6 months ago, I’ve launch a very, very simple tool to find a users or pages Facebook ID. I’ve done that with PHP and then forgot about it.
2 months later, in FriendFeed, someone needed to find their Facebook ID and instead of showing them Graph API, I remembered my ID Finder and send the link. Someone in the comments said I needed this ID Finder as a standalone web site. I didn’t see the need but then someone else offered me “fbidfinder.com” domain name and I was like “well, it can’t hurt, could it?”.
So I’ve rewritten the old tool and opened FBIDFinder.com. I’ve used Silex, a light PHP framework, with its template engine. I don’t know why I did that. I feel stupid. Why, you may ask. Because I didn’t need it. I didn’t need any server-side languages.
A week ago I changed my server and realized FBIDFinder.com is not working anymore because this new server (which had the old IP of my old, PHP supported, server) didn’t have PHP installed. While fixing it, I’ve hated myself for using PHP for this kind of tool. It was and is unnecessary. Today, in this beautiful sunday, I’ve rewritten this simple tool again. In 5 minutes. Without any server-side language. That, I feel, is the right way.
Now it’s running on Amazon’s S3 and it works fast. Really fast. Why? Because it’s just plain old HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
I told you this story because,
- I needed to write something on this blog,
- To warn you. Do not use server-side languages when you don’t need them. It’s silly and stupid. It used your servers resources and you can need those resources. Unless there is some kind of business logic you need to keep as a secret, simple apps are better with client-side technologies. That’s in my opinion, of course.
