I've heard that some people build UIs with thousands of dependencies, in JavaScript that hits the server for text that is then parsed to object that are then passed through all sorts of classes that each spit out HTML. They also do some weird stuff with events like key-ups in order to re-render input fields based on objects rather than letting the browser manage those kinds of things. Sounds pretty weird to me.
If you think that's bad you do not want to know what's happening in the code for a desktop or a native app.
Uhm, I do know what happens and it's fine? I mean yeah, today we're using X11 to push application-created images even though the protocol encourages you to render applications from lines, horribly rendered text, and ellipses or something... Btw lines can be stippled, wow!
Wonderful story - thanks! I was at Chase Manhattan in London from 1997-2000, and remember the Lotus Notes system well. I had Win NT and Solaris desktop systems. There was an appalling timesheet system called Agresso, the most counterintuitive Windows GUI I ever encountered. I guess the lesson is that mgmt diktat in corp envs repeatedly inflicts crappy solutions on captive users. Plus ca change!
No! It cannot be that Agresso was already around at that time. I still have to work with that horrific system, even though it is webbased now. It's still a horrible experience.
Agresso was my first job. I got to migrate customers off of Ingres, Sybase, Informix to either Oracle or SQL Server 6.5. After some time, I got the opportunity to build their Crystal Reports integration. This was 1997-1998.
No! It cannot be that Agresso was already around at that time. I still have to work with that horrific system, even though it is webbased now. It's still a horrible experience.
Agresso was my first job. I got to migrate customers off of Ingres, Sybase, Informix to either Oracle or SQL Server 6.5. After some time, I got the opportunity to build their Crystal Reports integration. This was 1997-1998.
Do you happen to know whether the back-end systems would still be the systems that you used to work on? I have a feeling it never really changed...
I think briefly it was considered cutting edge to have your page content be delivered as an XML document, with an accompanying XSL or XSLT file to mechanically translate the XML into a full-fledged XHTML page suitable for rendering in a browser. I even saw it once on some public website, I think maybe for a Blizzard game? The content XML looked great; very intuitive. The XSLT stuff for translating into XHTML, well, n…
The Swedish election authority builds its website like this: https://val.se/
XSLT is quite different and really powerful. I helped a friend once, he wanted to import his iTunes Db to Qlik for analysis. iTunes keeps its data, with number of plays and all statistics, in an XML file. Qlik has XSLT support. So it was just a matter of a couple of lines of XSLT to get all the data into Qlik. It literally went from a complete headscratcher to done with half an hour of studying MDN's XSLT documentation and some experimentation.
I used to work at a company that behind the scenes had to use a web UI in a weird/novel way for their system to work. This company's web UI would allow its users to initiate bank transactions. Nothing weird from the user's end. However, the company had to "approve" the transactions in real time, synchronously. The company could do all sorts of programmatic verification on the user, recipient, transaction, etc, but we…
Easily the most amusing thing I've read all day. Was this compliant?
Oh, I couldn't tell you. For the same reason that I couldn't reveal the name of the organisation; to protect the guilty :)
This is a bit of an odd answer, even in a question that expects odd answers. That is because it sounds so normal, yet I have Googled for it and almost no one advocates for it. They do maybe advocate for it in terms of design, but I mean in making actual static websites. Enter Google Slides: the product for your uncle Joe and aunt Lysa to create their own websites without knowing how to code! I even have an example we…
Similar idea: I‘ve heard that Keynote is (was) popular as a protyping tool inside apple.
I think It‘s actually the best tool do this on the iPad right now. At first the links seem limited because you link to slide numbers, but they actually update when you move things around. Magic Move is beyond what any design/prototyping tool can do in terms of zero effort animation (though figma launched somehtng like this yesterday?).
Last time I checked Gtk has a web backend, meaning you can run basically any gtk app with the right environment variables and it'll pop open a browser with the app rendered pixel perfect into it. I don't really think it's useful as an actual web technology since you'd need to spawn a process, reserve a port, and keep a connection open for each and every user which seems like it wouldn't be workable. It's a neat trick…
It's called Broadway, and still going on: https://blogs.gnome.org/alexl/2019/03/29/broadway-adventures... https://people.gnome.org/~alexl/broadway-gtk4.html
Oh awesome, I actually messed with broadway some yesterday on Gtk3 and while it works incredibly well it has some drawbacks to the point where I don't really see a use case so maybe you can enlighten me somewhat.
The main downside I see is that every single keystroke needs a roundtrip to the server. Given a ping time of ~200ms that already makes it nearly unusable. So that leaves running broadway on localhost but then why use broadway at all? You might as well run it normally.
Anyways it's a really cool backend and I feel like with a small amount of work it could actually be used for web-apps, with the amazing advantage of basically eliminating front-end programming entirely.
Agresso was my first job. I got to migrate customers off of Ingres, Sybase, Informix to either Oracle or SQL Server 6.5. After some time, I got the opportunity to build their Crystal Reports integration. This was 1997-1998.
Do you happen to know whether the back-end systems would still be the systems that you used to work on? I have a feeling it never really changed...
Sorry, I have no insight in that. When I was there we were just upgrading to Agresso 5, and as I remember it, it was pretty much a win32 app talking directly to the database. Not sure how much, if any, server part was there in between. So it has probably changed when they switched to web.
it's just a proof of concept, but this web site discussed a few weeks ago absolutely blew my socks off: discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20929801 site: https://3dforreddit.com/r/pics From a comment: " How to use it Desktop: Click to start, WASD and mouse to move Mobile: Dragging on left half of screen is move, right have is look Append any subreddit to the url to switch subreddits " It should work in…
I mean yes... but recall that the entire point of the system was that it would make data entry slow. I think that whoever set it up probably felt that the clunky form was enough of a rate limiter and nothing further was needed on the back end.
Just to make sure I get this right - to make sure their team wouldn't get overwhelmed with work (how exactly? It's not like the demand for cable wiring would be too different at the end of a year in a frictionless system) they not only decided to create busywork for other departments, but this design also blew up impacting the entire company? Do you know if there were any consequences for whoever created this monstro…
No, this is every day in Chase. They are basically the McDonalds of the financial services industry - everybody works there at least once, most people move on to better things, what you have left are the ones who know they will never succeed anywhere else. We convinced one manager at Chase that the reason her application crashed so much was because there wasn't enough gigawatts to power the flex capacitors. The guy who they hired for IT security in my department was a bricklayer who ran around with a dog-eared copy of Computer Security For Dummies trying to find out where we were hiding the NFS so he could turn it off (we kept telling him we didn't use NFS and he didn't believe us, so the hunt continued). Probably the worst story was this really portly fellow who couldn't fit into the bathroom stalls, and was too lazy to walk across the floor to the bathroom that had a handicap stall he could fit in, so he would just sort of stand in front of the stall door and cut loose, and every night some poor cleaning lady had to deal with that and it didn't raise any eyebrows at all. Sounds like an NBC sitcom, but it was real, places like this really do exist, stuff like this really does happen.