Live data from Hacker News

Hotwire: HTML over the Wire

hotwire.dev

111–120 of 573 posts

Re: Hotwire: HTML over the Wire

#111

amazing. This used to be called /cgi-bin/ with templates and XMLHttpRequest (a Microsoft invention initially supported only in IE then adopted by everyone) and now it's suddenly a new technology/approach but with a new name so you're not ridiculed for using it? I gotta give them credit for revisiting server-side page assembling though; moving application logic and templating mostly to the front end was a HUGE mistake…

> and now it's suddenly a new technology/approach

I don't think I've ever seen DHH or the Basecamp crew advertise any of this type of stuff as some groundbreaking new approach that nobody has ever tried before. On the contrary, I usually see them talking about how those old ways of doing web development were actually better in many ways, which is why they're pushing to move away from the current "everything is an SPA" approach.

And all this new tooling makes the experience much better than it ever was in the past.

Re: Hotwire: HTML over the Wire

#113
post #96
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is plenty of duck tape yes, But there is suprisingly little layers on layers. Part of what has been amazing about the web is that the target remains the same. There is the DOM. Everyone is trying different ways to build & update the DOM. Agreed that there are better alternatives than a lot of what is out there. We seem to be in a mass consolidation, focusing around a couple very popular systems. I am glad to se…

If by surprisingly little, you mean 4 pages and 500mb of requirements for a "hello world" project with the "modern" web, then yes. The DOM has always been a mess, much like javascript. And the fact that no one has tried to do something about it contributes to the mountains of duckt tape. It was bad enough when angular showed up, but when all the other mumbo jumbo showed up like react, vue, webpack and whatnot is when…

npm does not compile, it is just a package manager. That said, I understand your frustration.

Re: Hotwire: HTML over the Wire

#115
post #4

What's old is new again. I recall ASP.NET had some interesting tech around this in the 2000s where it could dynamically update parts of the page. If I recall correctly, this made use of that new technology of the time called "XMLHttpRequest" (/s) which pretty much jump-started web 2.0.

[deleted]

Re: Hotwire: HTML over the Wire

#116
post #92
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My thought exactly, though I fully support that. I often rant about how the modern web is billions of layers of duck tape over duck tape and it has become an unmanageable mess of libraries, frameworks, resources, all while javascript remains the most outrageous and absurd language ever created. I'm by no means a fan of rails or ruby for that matter but I think things like these are a considerably better alternative t…

Surely your point could be made better without the hyperbole? "Most outrageous and absurd language ever," "Megabytes of javascript", "corporate-grade bandwidth", "8th-gen i7 and 8GB of memory" to open "3 images and a contact form." I'm sure you can find one or two poorly-optimized sites that have 2MB of javascript to download, but it's by no means the necessary outcome of using "ridiculous libraries and frameworks,"…

> one or two poorly-optimized sites

Try every old media site and most e-commerce.

Re: Hotwire: HTML over the Wire

#117
post #100
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My thought exactly, though I fully support that. I often rant about how the modern web is billions of layers of duck tape over duck tape and it has become an unmanageable mess of libraries, frameworks, resources, all while javascript remains the most outrageous and absurd language ever created. I'm by no means a fan of rails or ruby for that matter but I think things like these are a considerably better alternative t…

Just wanted to point out that it is called duct tape, just to avoid misunderstandings since i had a similiar spelling error as a non-native speaker :)

Interestingly, waterproof fabric-based tape was originally called "duck tape" (for its waterproof quality). The same kind of tape was later also called duct tape, but it's actually pretty terrible for ducts. You want to use the all-aluminum tape for ducts. https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/52151/it-duck-tape-or-du...

Re: Hotwire: HTML over the Wire

#118

I've never seen one of these "logic in html-attributes" systems take error checking seriously. In stimulus they start to mention it in "Designing For Resilience" (though only for feature-checking), but in "Working With External Resources" where it uses calls network/IO bound calls they never mention how to handle errors or if the framework just leaves it up to you. Stimulus is also where you need to write your own js…

I’ve used intercooler with browser-side routing and, the strategy for error recovery that makes sense in that context is “if something goes wrong, reload the page”: the server is designed to be able render the whole page or arbitrary subsets and, so, reloading should usually be safe.

[deleted]

Re: Hotwire: HTML over the Wire

#119
post #58

This all seems super cool, but mega complicated. I'm not in the Rails ecosystem at all, so would love someone's assessment. Is this a new, giant complexity or a nice add-on? A huge mental/development shift or a nicely paved new path to something better?

I’m in the Rails system so this seems like blissful simplicity compared to the React/redux/typescript/whatever else is new this week world

Re: Hotwire: HTML over the Wire

#120
This is so exciting to see, especially for older folk like me.

Almost 20 years ago, one of my professors told us before graduation that hot tech is mostly about the idea pendulum swinging back and forth. I immediately chalked it up to 65+ above white wise men snobbery.

However, this is exactly that. We started with static pages, then came Ajax and Asp.net and the open source variants, then we went full SPA, now we are moving back to server side because things are too complicated.

Obviously tech is different, better, more efficient but the overall idea seems to be the same.

Post reply on HN