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I don't care how you web dev; I just need more better web apps

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Re: I don't care how you web dev; I just need more better web apps

#201

Post by mattbrewsbytes »

omarhaneef wrote: post #28

The author complains that developers argue about their tools and methods, insist on their favorite techniques, but produce (more) worse apps. Particularly for the amount of time and effort expended on developing the apps. The thing is: the debates aren’t naive. They’re exactly trying to workout the details. When someone says, hey forget postgresql and just use SQLite, and someone else says good luck if you hit n rows…

Everyone is going to miss the point here and go down rabbit holes about various technical bits and that is exactly the point: developers spend lots of time debating everything

The limited resources really doesn't matter. The tech choices really don't matter. Pick a prominent MVC based web framework, a RDBMS, some front-end libraries and go build the thing. Lean towards picking stuff the team has experience using. Then if the web app gets heavier traffic, horizontally scale the web tier and vertically scale the DB to your companies budget. If that amount of scaling doesn't suffice - do the research as you approach that level of traffic not when you have zero users.

When it comes down to standard web apps there are known patterns and known solutions out there to solve the majority of the problems. Reaching for a new/shiny thing to use is fun, learning new development techniques is fun but its rare either of those is going to cause a fundamental shift in solving problems with web apps. We have been using (abusing?) HTTP/HTML/JS/CSS for 25+ years. For small web apps I bet people could solve things with simple PERL/PHP cgi-bin types of scripts today with current versions of HTML/JS/CSS, albeit more securely than in 1999.

To use a building a house analogy, sometimes its like all the carpenters are standing around for days talking about what tool is better to frame the house, one uses less nails, one is faster, one is a nail with wood glue that will expand at the joint and provide less squeaky floors (I made that up). None of it really matters, you're being paid to frame a house, not do research - just build the thing.

Re: I don't care how you web dev; I just need more better web apps

#202

Post by simonh »

ratww wrote: post #199
simonh wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Discussing the technologies or patterns involved without building anything and especially without building a complete working product with your favourite elegant tool.... But surely, if anywhere, this is the place to talk to people who have built complete working system, are building them, and intend to build more of them. This isn't a forum for a bunch of undergrads chatting about stuff they just learned in college…

> If the app becomes hugely popular, needs to serve massive volumes of data and sync across thousands of instances, well, it won't This argument is so overused for justifying any kind of complexity that it would border on comical if it weren't causing so many issues in our industry. There is absolutely no guarantee that the MongoDB + Kafka will also work with the hypothetical "massive volumes of data" you're talking…

Right, but if you're scaling it up to meet changing requirements, well, that's now a different use case. How do you do that scaling up effectively? That's where discussion here comes in.

I'm not at all arguing that you need MongoDB and Kafka, those are not my examples, but pretending that SQLite and plain HTML are the be-all, end-all is bizarre. OK, you're a big fan of PostgreSQL. Cool. Now we're talking. In what situations and why is a useful discussion to have. That's grounds for fertile and relevant architectural debate, and here is a good place to do that. Arguing that isn't the case is, well, ok... problem solved then. I suppose there's not much more to talk about.

Re: I don't care how you web dev; I just need more better web apps

#203

Post by unsupp0rted »

deergomoo wrote: post #197
mb7733 wrote: post #101

>I’m hard-pressed to name more than a handful of web apps that I would say are genuinely good with no major flaw. >Content websites are a different matter. A static or server-rendered content website with adequate typography and semantic markup is generally going to do its job pretty well. I feel the exact opposite. Most web-based applications are pretty incredible these days. It's the "content websites" that are ins…

It’s so bad now that an ad-blocker is rarely sufficient, because even without the ads every other paragraph is broken up by some autoplaying video or some callout to a different article. In some cases I genuinely struggle to read an article without reader mode or an RSS reader that can scrape the full article.

It's been years since I tried to read an article without reader mode. Reader mode is fast enough and accurate enough now that there's no need to bother not using it.

Re: I don't care how you web dev; I just need more better web apps

#204

Post by lawgimenez »

tommica wrote: post #83
lawgimenez wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is true, I started with Java ME too with Eclipse IDE then proceeded to integrating Blackberry SDK and then it started from there. Mobile development's phase right Blackberry disappeared never recovered, it went 0 to 100 real quick from that very moment. I was still hacking some J2ME for a Nokia app then Samsung released an Android phone and I was like wtf is an Android.

> and I was like wtf is an Android. Did you ever find that out? :D

Unfortunately yes.

Re: I don't care how you web dev; I just need more better web apps

#205

Post by ratww »

simonh wrote: post #202
ratww wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If the app becomes hugely popular, needs to serve massive volumes of data and sync across thousands of instances, well, it won't This argument is so overused for justifying any kind of complexity that it would border on comical if it weren't causing so many issues in our industry. There is absolutely no guarantee that the MongoDB + Kafka will also work with the hypothetical "massive volumes of data" you're talking…

Right, but if you're scaling it up to meet changing requirements, well, that's now a different use case. How do you do that scaling up effectively? That's where discussion here comes in. I'm not at all arguing that you need MongoDB and Kafka, those are not my examples, but pretending that SQLite and plain HTML are the be-all, end-all is bizarre. OK, you're a big fan of PostgreSQL. Cool. Now we're talking. In what sit…

I don't think GP is claiming that SQLite is the "be-all, end-all" for all cases.

But it definitely is for when a website doesn't need to scale, which are the vast majority of cases. Disks (or rather SSDs + memory backed cache) are extremely fast. For cases when it doesn't work anymore, there's an easy migration path to whatever relational DB that I mentioned.

The argument isn't that SQLite is the "be-all, end-all", it's more that MongoDB, Kafka and other tools are the opposite of it: they don't hit a sweet spot for small sites (and also often doesn't for growing ones, or or big ones too), so there's no much point in starting there, as you'll only get problems and might hamper the website growth.

Re: I don't care how you web dev; I just need more better web apps

#206

Post by zhte415 »

onion2k wrote: post #142
zhte415 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Choosing to do nothing is still choosing to do something. In choosing to do something, one makes an informed choice . How informed that is is up to you. Row limit may be one, or performance or feature set may be another - say, choosing Postgres for some data types and easier indexing. Making informed choices are of benefit to the user. How much benefit depends on one's opportunity cost doing X instead of Y. Choosing…

There are reasonable lengths to dive, of which zero should not be a default case. The fact you're even aware that there's an alternative to choose means you're already slightly informed[1]. Being a bit more informed so that you know a solution will actually work is fine. I am not suggesting you shouldn't look at alternatives. I'm saying you should look at alternatives from the perspective of the solving the problem y…

> from the perspective of the solving the problem you have

Completely. A small planning goes a long way, and helps define what problem is being solved. This is a particular peeve I have with lauding of pivoting. The plan didn't work out and you're now doing something else? That's great. At least something was gained and you're looking forward. But don't design for it. In other industries this goes by the perhaps less jargony terms salvage or wasteful production. But putting salvageable and waste in the description of a product solution doesn't sound as nice, and nor should it.

Re: I don't care how you web dev; I just need more better web apps

#207

Post by Silica6149 »

Gareth321 wrote: post #129

I hate web apps with a passion. Has anyone ever used the iOS YouTube app? This thing is hailed as a marvelous examples of web apps working "like native." Bollocks. It's an absolute mess. If one of the wealthiest companies in the world can't build a decent web app, there is no hope for anyone else. Web apps get the user 80% of what they want with 50% of the cost, so the business case is clear. That's why these apps ar…

Exactly. Money's always the answer behind why large companies seemingly make bad software. There's always some cost-benefit analysis behind every decision.

Re: I don't care how you web dev; I just need more better web apps

#208

Post by bluGill »

burntoutfire wrote: post #172
noir_lord wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given it's ~2 billion rows for every person the planet I reckon so. Other than Facebook who has 2 billion rows for every person the planet (tongue in cheek).

Telemetrics and sensors data could (at least theoretically) produce billions of row per hour per single sensor.

I work on such a system and one of the things we do is figure out which of that sensor data to throw away. In most cases the change between measures is too small to be worth saving, and because we have less data saved we can analyse it faster and thus do something useful with it. The purposes of all that data isn't to fill storage, it is to allow making useful decisions based on it. If you can't make a better decision based on sensor input then don't save it.

Re: I don't care how you web dev; I just need more better web apps

#209

Post by pketh »

ls15 wrote: post #91
pketh wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah ic, are they jittery in the sense that they’re skipping/dropping frames or moving unexpectedly fast?

I think they need to be more smooth in order to look natural, so I would try with some basic easeInOut or easeOut instead of the jumpy movement and then go from there. In my opinion interaction animations should be really fast, otherwise they slow down some users. I also wonder if there is a timing issue with invoking the animations. Some of them get invoked immediately on hover and some of them seem to be delayed.

it's hard to tell whether the animations are functioning as designed for you, it's possible they're bugging out/skipping frames on your device. If you're able to email me a screencast (hi@kinopio.club, or post on the forums at club.kinopio.club) that'd be super useful for tweaking things

Re: I don't care how you web dev; I just need more better web apps

#210

Post by adamauckland »

jerrre wrote: post #192
adamauckland wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Long time ago we ran several large insurance websites, fairly standard SQL Server backend. Once day I got into work and a slightly panicky dev said "We need to change the primary key on all the tables" It was using an int and at the current rate of data entry, was going to blow the maximum record number in a couple of days.

you could take this anecdote as a proof for how rarely these things happen

Yeah, that's true, the one time in 25 years.
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