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Hotwire: HTML over the Wire

hotwire.dev

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Re: Hotwire: HTML over the Wire

#241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m glad this technique is making a comeback. The last 10 years of JavaScript on the client have been an utter shit show that left me wondering wtf people were thinking.

You have the benefit of hindsight at this time. You can draw parallel to history of flight and all the crazy contraptions that people attempted. Great technology can emerge from the combination of numerous shit shows. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

I'm not a front end engineer, but it always seemed crazy to me. I remember testing out the Google Web Toolkit when it came out more than a decade ago, and the craziest thing about it to me wasn't the Java --> JavaScript compilation, it was that the server just dumped an empty page and filled everything in with JavaScript on the client.

Then, remember the awful awful #! URLs? Atrocious, and seemed like obviously a terrible idea from the start, yet they spread, and have mostly died, thankfully. But even with the lessons from these bad tech designs, new frameworks come out that repeat mistakes, yet get incredible hype.

Re: Hotwire: HTML over the Wire

#242
post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

cgi-bin didn’t give you the ability to update a chat page across several different windows in near real-time.

It did if you used XMLHttpRequest.

If you type a chat message in your browser, how does it automatically show up in my browser with XMLHttpRequest?

Re: Hotwire: HTML over the Wire

#243

It took a decade for the industry to realize that JS frameworks were overhyped and the degraded productivity because of them was not worthy. I think they will be replaced by Hotwire-like technologies in the next decade. The same thing will happen to micro services (especially, distributed monolith) and Kubernetes. They are just overhyped. Productivity matters most!

The last decade in tech has shown that productivity does not matter most and I'm not sure the pendulum is swinging back (yet?). The only time productivity matters most is maybe small, bootstrapped businesses where cash isn't infinite and actual value delivered is what matters. In fact, the company behind this is Basecamp which is almost an outlier in tech at this point, as they're one of the few out there that actually makes its $$$ by selling products/services people pay money for, as opposed to endless VC money or acquisitions.

When it comes to VC-funded crap or big legacy enterprise trying to "modernise" itself, over-engineering allows grifters to twist the situation for their own personal gain. The business problem the tech is supposed to solve often warrants a simple solution, but why would someone solve it with a simple solution and 3 people when they can bring Kubernetes, microservices, "service mesh", blockchain and multiple programming languages to the mix and suddenly become an "engineering manager" managing 30 people, put big words on their resumes and speak at conferences about how they solve big (self-inflicted, as a side-effect of the overengineering) problems where more of their peers (either new and genuinely believing this is the proper way to do things - like I once was - or experienced enough to know this is BS but support it as it paves the way for their own career) encourage them?

This happens at multiple levels too, it's not just developers or would-be engineering managers. The funding side of things is also broken in the sense that you'll attract more investors and raise more money (some of which you'll keep in your pocket as salary, even if the company folds in the end) if you throw big words and pitch an over-engineered solutions such as blockchain as opposed to a simple and proven one (even though the latter is more likely to actually pay off).

Re: Hotwire: HTML over the Wire

#244
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…

>65+ above white wise men snobbery

Nice! Casual ageism and racism mixed into one post.

Re: Hotwire: HTML over the Wire

#245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

And serverless is an anemic CICS executing non-transactions.

Serverless is kind of like Apache running PHP scripts in virtual hosts.

Re: Hotwire: HTML over the Wire

#246
post #83

'HTML over the wire' is an unfortunate tagline, but it does actually seem interesting, I'd suggest looking at the 'Turbo' docs before reacting. I have thought in the past I wish I could have a frameworky component-style frontend, but where the component is HTML rendered by my rust (or whatever) backend. This would seem to get me a lot closer to that.

Yes, I’m curious how hard it is to get this working with a different backend stack. I’d love to have this in Go.

Re: Hotwire: HTML over the Wire

#247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Do people really want that stuff out do they just think they want it?

If you have trouble selling a product without that stuff, does it make a difference?

Re: Hotwire: HTML over the Wire

#248
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…

>65+ above white wise men snobbery Nice! Casual ageism and racism mixed into one post.

Seriously. That's a WTF from me, dawg...

Re: Hotwire: HTML over the Wire

#249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counterpoint: is there any error handling in the majority of SPAs today? From my experience, SPAs can crap out in all kinds of interesting ways when the underlying network connection is flaky and I often end up stuck on some kind of spinner that will never complete (nor give me a way to abort & retry the operation when I already know it won't complete and don't want to wait for the ~30-second timeout, if there is a t…

I refresh SPA apps more than other apps because of these problems.

Me too. However, this also doesn't work properly on a lot of SPAs xD

Re: Hotwire: HTML over the Wire

#250
post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It did if you used XMLHttpRequest.

If you type a chat message in your browser, how does it automatically show up in my browser with XMLHttpRequest?

In old school chat rooms, this was usually done by polling for new messages every X seconds, or doing a refresh / reload of an IFrame containing the chat.
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