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JavaScript Conquered the Web, Now It’s Taking Over the Desktop

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Re: JavaScript Conquered the Web, Now It’s Taking Over the Desktop

#241

Post by dpark »

behnamoh wrote: post #191
serge2k wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (Oracle, Microsoft, ...) who force Java and JS on everybody. Why call out Microsoft? They aren't forcing Java or JS. They came up with C# and Typescript instead. I can't speak to Typescript, but C# is way more fun to write than Java. It's not particularly interesting or glamorous, but it is nicer to write.

I meant in general. Microsoft did force their flawed Windows on everybody anyway.

Microsoft forced Windows on everyone, therefore by the transitive property of online griping, Microsoft also forced JS and Java on everyone? But in general, so it makes sense.

This is like saying Coca-Cola is responsible for the high sugar content in Hershey's chocolate. In general.

Disclosure: Microsoft employee.

Re: JavaScript Conquered the Web, Now It’s Taking Over the Desktop

#242

Post by sidlls »

t1amat wrote: post #177
sidlls wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This whole thing just stinks of forcing the browser to be a (terrible, poorly functioning, and inconsistent) abstraction over the OS. The browser/webapp model of application development is just awful.

I don't think anyone would argue that web development is perfect. What is? But, thanks to the ubiquity of the web browser, it is the only way to create a common user interface across any platform. Given that context I am grateful to have it.

Common user interface across any browser (platform) that supports it, you mean. Like any other language.

Re: JavaScript Conquered the Web, Now It’s Taking Over the Desktop

#243

Post by wpietri »

vidarh wrote: post #49
wpietri wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel your pain. My first computer had 4K of RAM; my second had 48K; my third, 640K. I learned to work small. It pains me to see the equivalent of Hello World taking up untold MB. But when I think about software as a business rather than an art, I have to concede that it's a very rare circumstance where RAM efficiency matters as much as I'd like. Note the way the cost of memory has declined: http://www.jcmit.com/mem…

Memory isn't the issue to me. Latency is. Most of the applications I work with today do a lot, that's true, but their UI latency is often worse than it was on my 7.16Mz M68000 Amiga 500, and other things as well are just slow . I've mentioned here several times in the past that on my laptop I can "boot" Linux-hosted AROS (so the problem is not the Linux kernel, nor X) with a custom startup script to boot it straight…

I don't disagree. I am certainly frustrated every time my phone feel sluggish, which is several times a day.

On the other hand, I've been frustrated with the slowness of computers for a long time. CPU speed, RAM, disk, everything has gotten way better. But I'm still just about as irritated, and I suspect that things are just about as sluggish.

Again, I think it's an economic equilibrium. Things are fast enough that most people buy them; those of us who want things faster aren't numerous to outvote those who want fancier features or cooler UI bling instead.

I hope this changes, but I'm not holding my breath.

Re: JavaScript Conquered the Web, Now It’s Taking Over the Desktop

#244

Post by nothis »

sdegutis wrote: post #125
nothis wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, the whole "{} + [] == 0" thing is cute and all, but isn't that just tip-of-the-iceberg hilarity? Isn't the real problem with javascript that it's slow and messy?

I was under the impression modern JS interpreters JIT to machine code and are fast. Kind of like how Java was slow in 1995 but today is kind of amazingly fast. Which I guess implies that there are two ways a language can become fast: one is by being designed for speed, and another is by becoming extremely popular/useful and having tons of millions of hours of thought and work put into making it faster.

Okay, but we can always replace "slow" by "slower than" and in a desktop environment (which the article is about), we could still compile C++ code to run natively and outperform JavaScript any day. The whole brouhaha about JavaScript being fast stemmed from it suddenly not being 10 times slower than native code in benchmarks. But it's still slower.

By using JavaScript you are, out of the box, sacrificing about 20% of your performance for the comfort of using it. In some cases, maybe only 10%. In others 50%.

I can totally understand how that's a trade-off one is willing to make in many cases. But for desktop apps, I kinda want them to run at full speed. Like, a 0.2 second delay can get annoying if it comes at the wrong time or stacks with something else. And somehow, you can feel that in many hyper-modern apps that are so many layers removed from the hardware, the devs probably don't even know where it touches it.

Re: JavaScript Conquered the Web, Now It’s Taking Over the Desktop

#245

Post by zwetan »

"Adobe’s AIR system enabled developers"

it still does, AIR v1.0 was in 2006, we are now at v23.0

Electron is nice but a whole browser engine is a big bloat, you can easily reach 150MB.

Not to go into a debate JS vs AS3, but the AIR runtime have a lot of advantages : AS3 the language is one, the default native API cover a lot of ground, being able to extend those native functionalities with ANE (ActionScript Native Extension) is nice too.

I don't buy the kool-aid that you could use the exact same HTML5/CSS/JS code for both the browser and a desktop app, unless the app is trivial you gonna have to build your UI/UX specifically for the desktop with all the different subtleties between different OS.

So sure you can use something like Electron to easily wrap an already existing web app for the desktop but imho either you are limiting the desktop features you could add or you will soon end up having 2 code base: 1 for the web and 1 for the desktop and that require more resources than just "wrapping it up for the desktop".

Re: JavaScript Conquered the Web, Now It’s Taking Over the Desktop

#246

Post by bbcbasic »

tracker1 wrote: post #235
bbcbasic wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yeah, and good luck dealing with that remote API that now gives you an extra field in the JSON or XML Java C# and every other decent typed language has good serialization and deserialization support. The extra field poses no problem.

I've had to consume Java generated wsdl in C#, having response types of "Object" from the Java side, meaning the .Net side has no properties on the responses from those methods, I'd have to disagree...

Nothing to do with static vs dynamic typing. Just get Java and C# to talk in another protocol. How about JSON or vanilla XML

Re: JavaScript Conquered the Web, Now It’s Taking Over the Desktop

#247

Post by jrpt »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #111
niftich wrote: post #40

The salient points of the article: - People are stuffing websites into Electron and packaging it as a native application - HTML/CSS/JS is considered 'hackable' because it's widely understood by today's semi-power-user audience Although the article doesn't say it, this seems to imply that: - Full-native development unique on each platform is considered too much effort, when you can get a cross-platform app with Electr…

I guess I believe it is common that if a platform becomes popular enough for developers - solutions will appear to allow them to reuse their knowledge in developing applications outside of their original target platform. Furthermore in the attempt to woo developers from one popular platform to another a myriad of solutions will appear to allow the developer to move their existing tools, methods, and general knowledge…

There are more advantages than just not having to learn something new. There are really compelling reasons you might want to use the same code in some combination of: a web browser, web server, Windows app, Mac app, iOS app, and Android app.

For instance, when FB used React Native for building one of their ad manager apps, they had 87% code reuse between iOS and Android (https://twitter.com/brindelle/status/618114397098102785) The implications that has on a company's eng organization are huge.

Another example is the code sharing between client and server in Meteor. That has big implications too.

The main reason Javascript is winning as the lingua franca is that it's pretty much the only language you can use in a browser. The main alternatives are things that compile to JS, like Babel, TypeScript, and for a while Coffeescript and Dart were gaining traction too. If browsers could run, say, Python, I suspect you'd see more Python used in this way as well.

Re: JavaScript Conquered the Web, Now It’s Taking Over the Desktop

#249

Post by fdgdasfadsf »

dccoolgai wrote: post #184
bbcbasic wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm not convinced. Is it pleasant UX that you can put petrol in your diesel car because the nozzle fits? Would it be pleasant UX to have your bank let someone withdraw money from your account without ID? Bleach bottle with no safety cap? Also the laid back kid of JS will throw a tantrum if the coffee is not a coffee. He'll throw the tantrum at your customer though (at runtime), not your developer (at compiler time).…

It would be pleasant if your engine didn't care whether you put gas or diesel in it and just ran. I think that's the point made in the cartoon. I like that the kid just holds the cup and pours it when I tell him to. If I wanted him to pour coffee and gave him a cup of beer, I'm ok saying that's my fault. I'd still rather have the kid. Having a guy that only accepts "Large cups of coffee" is necessary at lower levels…

To continue the analogy what happens when you accidentally pass him a cup of bleach?

Re: JavaScript Conquered the Web, Now It’s Taking Over the Desktop

#250

Post by fdgdasfadsf »

st3v3r wrote: post #131
api wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Full-native development unique on each platform is considered too much effort, when you can get a cross-platform app with Electron" Yes, it's this. Full native development is awful since every platform is completely different, and other cross-platform solutions like Qt are a bit behind the web in terms of modern look and feel and developer base. But Electron is also awful, since a hello world app uses 100mb of RAM…

"But Electron is also awful, since a hello world app uses 100mb of RAM." Is it that awful, though? Most computers come with 4-16GB of RAM.

Yes - some of us want to use our multitasking systems for multitasking.
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