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This Week in Rails: jQuery no longer part of Rails, and more

weblog.rubyonrails.org

41–50 of 143 posts

Re: This Week in Rails: jQuery no longer part of Rails, and more

#41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>PHP made web development accessible to the masses. Because PHP is embedded in the HTML itself, it is way easier to work with than Perl or Java, especially in the context of The Web In 1999. PHP didn't make it easy. It made it possible. Until fairly recently, getting a VPS was insanely expensive, so any learner, hobby, startup went to shared hosting. As a result, any tech which required starting servers or elevated p…

CGI scripts were also a lot harder to secure on shared hosting. I remember the hosts supporting them required security review before being installation. Then PHP came along with safe_mode and open_basedir, and if there were commonly-deployed solutions for CGI after that, I sure didn't see them because everyone was already using PHP.

I was lucky. I was able to upload cgi myself. It was just too much hassle for little gain (whatever security exploits you'd get in PHP, you'd get writing your own C code).

Oh, and how can I forget, mod rewrites were a terrible pain, so if you wanted your website to be dynamic (so you can have, say, your login name at the top corner), you'd have to make your website look like http://www.example.com/cgi-bin/main.pl?url=/directory/page5

Re: This Week in Rails: jQuery no longer part of Rails, and more

#42
post #24

Now they just need to replace coffeescript with es6/babel.

I'm not a fan of CoffeeScript but do they really need to lug the huge amount of dependencies babel brings along with it? Why not target ES5 with some ES2015 sprinkles in depending on compatibility and slowly work towards ES6?

Re: This Week in Rails: jQuery no longer part of Rails, and more

#43
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Although the comparison isn't perfect, you can think of jQuery as PHP in the late 90s and early 00s. PHP made web development accessible to the masses. Because PHP is embedded in the HTML itself, it is way easier to work with than Perl or Java, especially in the context of The Web In 1999. In the same vein, jQuery filled a very important niche when the web was just getting started. It made Javascript accessible, by s…

>PHP made web development accessible to the masses. Because PHP is embedded in the HTML itself, it is way easier to work with than Perl or Java, especially in the context of The Web In 1999. PHP didn't make it easy. It made it possible. Until fairly recently, getting a VPS was insanely expensive, so any learner, hobby, startup went to shared hosting. As a result, any tech which required starting servers or elevated p…

No. You could give CGIs any filename, in any directory, on many shared hosting environments in the 90s. I know because I did it. Some shared hosting providers allowed persistent processes. Also, in the 90s, many small businesses self-hosted on tower PCs connected by fractional T1s. Many hobbyists self-hosted on dorm Ethernet (which had publically routed static IPs then) or got a corporate network administrator buddy to give them bootleg colocation.

PHP was successful because it was embedded in the HTML which lowered the barrier of entry. That's the only reason.

Re: This Week in Rails: jQuery no longer part of Rails, and more

#44
post #9

Really interesting, the replacement is a vanilla js implementation called rails-ujs and was made by someone who went through Google Summer Of Code! "The new rails-ujs was developed by @liudangyi as part of Google Summer of Code, all credits for this goes to him and to his mentor @pixeltrix " - https://github.com/rails/rails/pull/27113

rails-ujs has been around for a long time (I want to say since the Rails 3 era, but not certain), the change here is to move that from jQuery to vanilla JS, just as back in the day it was once migrated from Prototype.js to jQuery

Re: This Week in Rails: jQuery no longer part of Rails, and more

#45
post #17

I misread it as "Ruby on Rails removed from the planet" and almost jumped for joy. Jokes aside, good riddance! jQuery had a good run, and now it's obsolete (maybe a strong word, and debatable). You don't bring an entire toolbox to pound in a loose nail. You don't import underscore to write "Hello, World". You shouldn't bring in jQuery to write client-side ES6. The one good thing that came from jQuery (maybe) is the D…

The amount of arrogance in this comment is very telling. While jQuery isnt used to build modern webapps, what jQuery did for web development is no small feat. Yes, you dont use Wright brothers' aircraft to fly people these days, but dont compare an early (and pioneering) tool against best practices of the day

Re: This Week in Rails: jQuery no longer part of Rails, and more

#46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>PHP made web development accessible to the masses. Because PHP is embedded in the HTML itself, it is way easier to work with than Perl or Java, especially in the context of The Web In 1999. PHP didn't make it easy. It made it possible. Until fairly recently, getting a VPS was insanely expensive, so any learner, hobby, startup went to shared hosting. As a result, any tech which required starting servers or elevated p…

No. You could give CGIs any filename, in any directory, on many shared hosting environments in the 90s. I know because I did it. Some shared hosting providers allowed persistent processes. Also, in the 90s, many small businesses self-hosted on tower PCs connected by fractional T1s. Many hobbyists self-hosted on dorm Ethernet (which had publically routed static IPs then) or got a corporate network administrator buddy…

>Also, in the 90s, many small businesses self-hosted on tower PCs connected by fractional T1s

You were lucky you weren't on a 14.4 kbps modem sharing a phone line with the family, on a dynamic IP, and had an extra PC to devote to hosting a website which could stay on 24/7.

Oh, and weren't scared that someone would hack into your home network just for fun.

> Some shared hosting providers allowed persistent processes

Most didn't.

> PHP was successful because it was embedded in the HTML which lowered the barrier of entry. That's the only reason.

No. That's not the _only_ reason. Right now, unless $5/10 a month is too much, you can get root on a VPS on DO.

How much did these features cost back then?

Re: This Week in Rails: jQuery no longer part of Rails, and more

#47
post #30
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

20% less

Alright Ben, I'm 100% joking.

I don't think you really got it jayajay:

You are talking down a tool that saved thousands of engineering hours and helped level the playing field between the browsers.

And then it seems you try to lie your way out of it. (The first comment looks nothing like a joke.)

Recommendation: own your mistake, be more careful next time. Oh, and skip unnecessary profanities.

Re: This Week in Rails: jQuery no longer part of Rails, and more

#48
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alright Ben, I'm 100% joking.

I don't think you really got it jayajay: You are talking down a tool that saved thousands of engineering hours and helped level the playing field between the browsers. And then it seems you try to lie your way out of it. (The first comment looks nothing like a joke.) Recommendation: own your mistake, be more careful next time. Oh, and skip unnecessary profanities.

> And then it seems you try to lie your way out of it.

Please be charitable and give others the benefit of the doubt when commenting here.

Re: This Week in Rails: jQuery no longer part of Rails, and more

#49
post #20

jQuery made it super easy to write shitty code. I used to think it was incredible, then I stopped writing it, and now I realize how fucking useless it is.

You're probably getting downvoted because of the combination of unsubstantiveness and dismissiveness. That's bad for an HN comment, so please don't do that.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13136943 and marked it off-topic.

Re: This Week in Rails: jQuery no longer part of Rails, and more

#50
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alright Ben, I'm 100% joking.

I don't think you really got it jayajay: You are talking down a tool that saved thousands of engineering hours and helped level the playing field between the browsers. And then it seems you try to lie your way out of it. (The first comment looks nothing like a joke.) Recommendation: own your mistake, be more careful next time. Oh, and skip unnecessary profanities.

If making a black joke at an all-black wedding isn't funny, I don't know what is.
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