The future of web software is HTML over WebSockets

He describes a "please wait buffering" future of web software. No thanks.

We are in the dark-ages with respect to streaming sockets, and I am the architect of one of the worlds largest WebSocket and streaming services.

First off, unseating the operational benefits provided by request response is a huge challenge. It's possible, and I've done it. One of these days, my co-authors and I will present an OSDI paper with the broad strokes. It's very easy to list a lot of the challenges with scaling WebSocket, but each of them can be solved.

I believe we will have a nicer world with QUIC --> Http/3 and the up and coming WebTransport discussion. SADLY, that will result in a decade long "caniuse" issue, so we should expect to see WebTransport polyfills to arrive...

Second, HTML over WebSockets is nice, but what is better is reactive data binding over the socket. Let the browser maintain a DOM tree that templates over a JSON object, then reactive-ly update and it's an amazing experience. You have minimal data transfer, and minimal rendering updates. There is a great deal of power in having your UI be a stateless function over a giant JSON object.

Finally, the big challenge is dealing with the server state in a meaningful way. The exceptionally nice property of using request response for everything is the shared-nothing stateless nature of the web server. It's exceptionally forgiving in both operational and developer issues.

It's very easy to fuck up the implicit state tied to the connection, and this requires discipline to get right. It's very easy to ship unreliable software that then has issues based on the connection.

Now, I'm a HUGE believer in that we need to use streams for everything, but it requires a mind shift. The key thing to tackle is dealing with the server side state, and this is where I have my shitty idea of a programming language for board games. In essence, I am building a DIY database such that people connect directly to the database and get that sweet giant JSON object along with a stream of updates.

The DIY part is related to the fact that I invented a programming language to transact on the JSON object such that you get all the benefits of durability with the mental model of working within a single machine.

http://www.adama-lang.org/

* not everyone has “two codebases” many people have one codebase and two different application distributions, one for server and one for client.

* you will still have “two codebases” you have just removed the rendering logic from you client codebase.

* What is the distribution of latencies of rendering json into html on the client? Are there numbers to suggest this takes more than 100ms for many people? If not the proposed efficiency advantages are being overstated.

If the article were suggesting removing client side logic completely these arguments would be stronger.

It is almost 30 years since the web came into existence and somehow people harbour this illusion that those who control the standards or are responsible for implementing them are genuinely committed to delivering technology which will help the competition (ie the rest of the world) bypasses their app stores.

It makes one wonder whether those who keep blabbing on about these wonderful new technologies are shills or just stupid.

Do they believe that a company that patented round corners and tie batteries to a particular phone to prevent it from working on another of the same make to be committed to technologies that bypasses their app stores?

Do they think companies which ban apps from their stores as a consequence of their political partisanship will create an easy and effective bypass for them?

I see someone mention Blazor below? Why not Silverlight? Oh it is proprietary.

Well there are only two players in the browser market now, Apple and Google, and somehow between the two of them they can't come up with an NPAPI replacement although one of them makes the other happy to the tune of $12bn a year.

It is 10 years since these companies conspired to deprecate Flash on the grounds that it was buggy and performance was poor. 10 years on phones and computers are an order of magnitude more powerful, yet through some mysterious means the replacement technologies are still buggy, underperformant, need more refinement yada yada yada.

Why do otherwise intelligent people continue to put with this fraud, or is more a matter of Stockholm Syndrome?