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Second-Guessing the Modern Web

macwright.org

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Re: Second-Guessing the Modern Web

#431

Post by int_19h »

benibela wrote: post #410
int_19h wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RAD never really died, we just stopped calling it that. But open Visual Studio today, and create a new Windows XAML app, then open the form designer. You can still drag a button from the toolbox, move it around, then double-click it to wire up an event handler - exactly like it was in VB6. In fact, it's quite possible to ignore all the modern stuff like data bindings entirely, and just manually read and update all wi…

A typical Delphi app might have done that, but a selling point of Delphi was that it had data binding. Connect the TDB* vies to a TDataSource, and it would show the values of a database, without requiring manual updates.

VB6 and WinForms also had data binding. But in practice I've rarely seen it used, except for data grids.

Re: Second-Guessing the Modern Web

#433

Post by TeMPOraL »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #387
searchableguy wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just look around your government systems. They have had decades to fix themselves but are they fixed yet? Are they faster, less bloatier, less user hostile and privacy invasive?

Let’s hope the public sector isn’t the model that the software industry is following.

Why, but it is. It's not the public sector that's causing these problems, it's the private companies that fulfill government contracts.

Re: Second-Guessing the Modern Web

#434

Post by TeMPOraL »

tsimionescu wrote: post #349
TeMPOraL wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say majority of programmer-hours, because anything else is a metric that's too unreliable / easy to fudge. "Individual products" is an arbitrary marketing distinction (e.g. a company I worked for could create and sell new products by tweaking few lines in a config file; every customer would get their own mix and match of software pieces). And neither investments nor revenue are directly correlated with the amount…

Using web technologies is not the same as doing crud web apps. Games for example are a very different kind of programming. And even if network admin and factory automation apps have web front-ends, that's still a minuscule part of the code.

Games are very different programming. Code surrounding games - lobby, game server lists, marketpaces, IAP - this is pure CRUD, and it's entirely unrelated to the game code.

Re: Second-Guessing the Modern Web

#435

Post by benibela »

mmis1000 wrote: post #202
commandlinefan wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> loads 50x-100x faster And takes less time to develop in the first place! These frameworks just seem like pure overhead to me.

You end up dupe your layout page everywhere and have a hard time update all of them if designer changed their mind. Or you could use some template system to do that… but if you need to use template, why not use react(or something like that) anyway?

The browsers had support for XSL templates

You write your website in XML and the browser renders it using the template

Re: Second-Guessing the Modern Web

#436

Post by Polylactic_acid »

icedchai wrote: post #428
withinboredom wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It literally does, unless you have the form POST or GET to an API directly + a redirect from the API. You have to override the submit functionality which is built-in by the browser. You have to maintain state of what the user inputs, which the browser handles for you. You have to reset inputs, which the browser handles for you (button type=reset). And a ton of people forget to actually validate on the server because…

It's sad how convoluted something as simple as form submission has become with "modern" Javascript frameworks. I'm not sure if it is React's fault, or the way most people use it, but it does seem to degrade into a mess of over-complexity. (I've been working on web sites since CGI scripts were a thing.)

Its as simple or as complex as you make it, you can use react to render a perfectly plain html form or you can manage it totally in react. And honestly, once you have everything set up and some previous examples, managing and submitting forms in react is trivial as well.

Re: Second-Guessing the Modern Web

#437

Post by userbinator »

robertoandred wrote: post #384
userbinator wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let the page refresh, what's wrong with going to `/orders/{order_id}` page to get information about the order? It is REST-ful and static Exactly. As a bonus, you automatically get the behaviour associated with a link that browsers already implement: people can bookmark a link for later use, open it in a new window, etc. All of which would need extra effort (and thus also easily break) if it was just a clickable eleme…

Not sure why you think SPAs can't have unique URLs or real links.

They can, but it requires additional work on the part of the developers, which in my experience is almost never done. Also, that's kind of what the SPA acronym stands for, no?

Re: Second-Guessing the Modern Web

#438

Post by mosdl »

richthegeek wrote: post #285
mosdl wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You still have to debug those - if you set the wrong state/etc, things will break like before. All react does is remove the need to modify the DOM directly when you want to modify things.

But setting the wrong state is someting that happens far less and is much more traceable, because the encapsulation of state changes into a single place massively reduces the side effects (and global state) that were the cause of 90% of those bugs in the bad old days.

The OP said: "The bugs of yesteryear, tracking down which procedural code path led to modifying a variable, are mostly gone with React."

Which is wrong, React doesn't address that in any way, shape or form.

Re: Second-Guessing the Modern Web

#439

Post by onemoresoop »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #330
onion2k wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very few SPAs give proper user feedback. There could be any number of silent errors in the background. Badly built apps that ignore errors and don't work well for users are certainly not limited to SPAs, and blaming SPA tech for that seems a bit unreasonable.

For "classical" websites, it was not possible to screw it up . The feeback was always there - clear, unmistakable, universal across sites. Boom, "No Internet", site's gone. Press "back" to get the previous state and click again/resubmit later. And it was nice that you could actually do that - use the "back" button to revert to the last correct state even without an Internet connection. Can't do that with almost any S…

Yes. And want to add that links are not links anymore.. They look like links but cannot be copied..

Re: Second-Guessing the Modern Web

#440

Post by cutemonster »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #175
luxphl wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Check out the sibling comments. Complex does not mean hard to use. My car is complex, but it's pretty easy to get a driver's license. Gatekeeping refers to making it seem like it's too hard to get into and therefore not worth trying for beginners/non-technical folk.

So by "gatekeeping", you mean that you think it just seems harder to get into, but actually isn't harder to get into? What do you think makes it falsely seem harder to get into for beginners, when it isn't really?

Maybe the docs new devs find, focus on fancy complicated libraries, instead of simple plain html or just a bit js

Writing such "more complicated" blog posts makes one look more talented?

I don't know

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