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Hotwire: HTML over the Wire

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Re: Hotwire: HTML over the Wire

#191

Post by csixty4 »

sourc3 wrote: post #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 ar…

I'd take it back even further:

We started out on mainframes.

Then things moved to the desktop, with some centralized functionality on servers (shared drives, batch jobs).

The processing moved to centralized web servers via the web, SAAS, and the cloud.

Then more moved into the client through React & similar.

And now things are moving back to the server.

Tick. Tock.

These changes are not just arbitrary whims of fashion, though. They're driven by generational improvements in technology and tooling.

Re: Hotwire: HTML over the Wire

#192

Post by mekkkkkk »

alunchbox wrote: post #159
mfer wrote: post #153

Earlier 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)

An interesting development is that the argument "common libraries will be cached in the browser" is no longer true. Chrome and other browsers are starting to scope their caches by domain, to mitigate tracking techniques that used 304 request timing to identify if the client had visited arbitrary URLs.

Yes, I'm aware that "it will be cached" lost most of its glory when bundling became mainstream, but I still hear it as an argument when pulling things from common CDNs.

Re: Hotwire: HTML over the Wire

#194

Post by exabrial »

csixty4 wrote: post #191
sourc3 wrote: post #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 ar…

I'd take it back even further: We started out on mainframes. Then things moved to the desktop, with some centralized functionality on servers (shared drives, batch jobs). The processing moved to centralized web servers via the web, SAAS, and the cloud. Then more moved into the client through React & similar. And now things are moving back to the server. Tick. Tock. These changes are not just arbitrary whims of fashio…

Virtual machines, containers, very similar to partitions and spaces on mainframes as well.

Re: Hotwire: HTML over the Wire

#195

Post by ivanhoe »

jack_riminton wrote: post #145

Most 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

It's a productivity hack for companies that have more backend devs that strongly prefer ruby to javascript, like a presume basecamp team is... AFAIK this doesn't apply to the average web dev teams nowadays, most of whom never even used ruby before...

Re: Hotwire: HTML over the Wire

#196

Post by dsego »

antoineMoPa wrote: post #176
dsego wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The backend here _is_ your frontend. Nothing stopping you from adding another service layer behind it.

The backend here _is_ your frontend. This supports my argument that there is tight coupling.

Between what? Your frontend is serving the html/css/js, that's your frontend. You can have another background service behind it, as many layers as you want. This separation doesn't have to be at the http level.

Re: Hotwire: HTML over the Wire

#197

Post by mfer »

mfer wrote: post #165
alunchbox wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

> 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. 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…

> 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.

This matters because of the poor, the elderly (on a fixed income), and those who aren't in first world countries don't have easy access to money to keep getting newer computers.

Then there is the environmental impact of tossing all those old computers.

So, there is both a people and environment impact.

Re: Hotwire: HTML over the Wire

#198

Post by [deleted] »

scubbo wrote: post #179
threwawaay wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like how so nonchalantly you turn this into a racist comment and yet no one is calling you out on it.

Probably because they are relating an anecdote from their past, and self-deprecatingly pointing out how naïve and overly-judgemental they were _back then_.

[deleted]

Re: Hotwire: HTML over the Wire

#199

Post by Osiris »

mdoms wrote: post #74

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.

I have a small website and I have one page with an order form and I show a modal with the result of the order. This is how I do it. The Ajax calls gets back HTML that it shoves into the modal. It was just easier than writing JS with templates and parsing JSON. It always felt icky to me because that's not the way you're "supposed" to do it, but it works quite well.

Re: Hotwire: HTML over the Wire

#200

Post by craftinator »

ChrisLTD wrote: post #55
axegon_ wrote: 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…

Preach! Websites don’t seem all that much better to me than they did 10 years ago [^fn], so what are we gaining with all these much more complex and fragile tools? [fn]: Arguably, the web is worse with chat bots, sticky headers, and modals constantly vying for your attention.

> Arguably, the web is worse with chat bots, sticky headers, and modals constantly vying for your attention.

We can blame this on the MBA types. I've literally never heard a software engineer say "hey, let's make this pop-up after they've already been looking at the page for a minute!" or anything like it.

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