Spoiler, it's just Ajax but it pushes the data through your templates before sending it to the client. We were doing this literally over a decade ago in the early days of XHR.
Hotwire: HTML over the Wire
161–170 of 573 posts
Re: Hotwire: HTML over the Wire
#162I wonder how long it will take before we reinvent SPAs? I like Hacker News in part because the tech is so boring. Server-side rendered, static HTML with a minimal amount of JS[0]. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/hn.js
I also prefer boring and love how HN works. That said though, modern consumers expect much more. We tech people like command lines, the ultimate in simple and boring. Modern consumers often want animation and things[1]. Source: UI/UX researchers tell me this when I push back and say "let's keep the tech simple and forgo some of the animations, etc in the name of using simple OOTB stuff without hacking thousands of li…
Re: Hotwire: HTML over the Wire
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's one of the reasons SPA aren't going anywhere: trying to handle all the user microinteractions on the server is great when you leave next to it, but it falls apart when your users are spread across the world, especially if it's not western-ish world with fast internet connections.
Huh? How does SPA help here? JSON payloads don't go faster over the wire than html.
Re: Hotwire: HTML over the Wire
#164Most of the comments here are along the lines of: this is old tech! But this isn’t really about the tech, it as much a productivity hack that allows people to be much closer to that old fashioned concept of a full stack developer This is what has allowed Basecamp to create Hey with a team just a fraction of the size of their competitors
Somewhere along the way Mythical Man Month was turned from a cautionary tale into a competition, and it only ever seems to happen once VC gets their mitts on a company. Does it really take a team of 800 engineers to maintain your fancy todo list app, rather than your focussed team of 10 or 20? What are all of those people doing except piling on organisational cruft so the business has no choice but to over-encumber i…
Re: Hotwire: HTML over the Wire
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not just that things are too complicated... the JS being sent to browsers is large and a lot of work. That requires more bandwidth, processing, and power usage on client devices. This eats phone, tablet, and laptop batteries.
But... that's one of the pro's of not having to do the rending cycle on the server. Also caching of framework libraries off CDN's and such. I don't see much merit in moving back to server side rendering aside from obfuscation & helping SEO ratings (web crawlers have a hard time with SPA)
This doesn't save battery life on a device. If someone downloads a few meg of JS their browser has to parse and execute that JS locally. This use of processing uses power. If that same person had half as much JS to parse and execute it would use less power.
A CDN does not save from this happening.
When power use happens on a server it's more on the server but less on devices with batteries. Batteries aren't used up as quickly (both between recharges and in their overall life).
A server side setup can cache and even use a CDN to only need to render parts that change.
My points are that it's not all cut and dry along with considering batteries.
Oh, and older systems (like 5 year old ones)... surfing the web on an older system can be a pain now because of JS proliferation.
Re: Hotwire: HTML over the Wire
#166This 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 ar…
Re: Hotwire: HTML over the Wire
#167This 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 ar…
Which part of that is supposed to be a reasonable thing to say?
Re: Hotwire: HTML over the Wire
#168Re: Hotwire: HTML over the Wire
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think this addresses all of what SPAs is used for. It seems to assume full-stack control.
It's specifically built for Rails, so yeah, it definitely assumes full-stack control. And there are definitely applications I would prefer to write as an SPA over the Hotwire approach. But given that the vast majority of websites are just a series of simple forms, I prefer this approach over the costs you incur from building an entire complex SPA.
Re: Hotwire: HTML over the Wire
#170This 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 ar…
You went to a school with professors and dismissed their final advice to you as "65+ above white wise men snobbery"? Which part of that is supposed to be a reasonable thing to say?