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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

#211

Post by pketh »

aaaaaaaaaaab wrote: post #99
pketh wrote: post #13

relevant but also self-promo: I build https://kinopio.club a spatial thinking tool that's also (I hope) a good website. I'm only one person without the resources to build separate ios/android apps so the website needs to work everywhere and be fast and responsive

The banner at the top is constantly appearing/disappearing. It’s super annoying, and this is just one of the issues… Sorry, but in its current state your website is a good example of why webapps are inferior to native ones.

i would like to have the header/footer fixed in position but safari ios doesn't accurately send position information during swipe scrolling that would let me keep it fixed without jittering. (Because the app is designed to be pinch scrolled and maintain the header, I can't just use regular css position:fixed)

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

#212

Post by bluGill »

foobarbaz33 wrote: post #195
hungryforcodes wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Must have been in the Jerassic period of MS SQL Server primary keys...

If you choose a 32-bit integer for your PK it can only address about ~4 billion records. That was true 1000 years ago, and will be true forever until a black hole swallows everything and changes the laws of reality.

Forget how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, the real question is can God change the value of pi, or can God make 32 bit integers larger than our current max? In both cases what it means to math is more Interesting than any yes/no.

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

#213

Post by bluGill »

adrianN wrote: post #103
onion2k wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When someone says, hey forget postgresql and just use SQLite, and someone else says good luck if you hit n rows, and someone says it can easily handle n+m rows with x memory … This is a good example of how devs get things wrong. The argument between which database to use because you might hit the row limit has zero benefit to the user. It's devs wanting to avoid future work to migrate from one database to another; a…

Maybe most apps never see the problem of hitting the row limit because the devs spend time beforehand thinking about which limitations they're likely to hit.

Long before you hit any row limit you will have performance problems because you have far too many rows to process in a reasonable amount of time. If you think about this problem and ensure you don't have too much data to process the row limit is so absurdly high you will never hit it.

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

#214

Post by julianlam »

mattbrewsbytes wrote: post #201
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. The…

> 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

The way I see it, modern web development isn't about debating which wood screws to use or which lengths of wood... it's arguing about which pre-fab construction to use (a framework), and whether it's acceptable that if you want to build a KitchenObject, you have to start off with a RoomObject and add PlumbingFixtures, but you end up with a ClosetChild in the kitchen because it was inherited with the RoomObject.

Meanwhile I'm just here building with 2x4s and wood screws, watching the debate rage on :)

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

#215

Post by bluGill »

dusted wrote: post #153
pzo wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Life got more complicated since introduction of smartphones and tablets - it's probably order of magnitude harder to do decent mobile app than desktop one: 1) you have smaller screen estate and have to split some forms into multiple page wizards ( on desktop if you lack space you just popup yet another window wherever it popups) 2) you have to support different screen orientations (portrait, landscape) 3) you have to…

Yes, this puts me solidly in the niche, I couldn't care less about mobile or tablet.. They're fine devices for.. I don't know really, making calls and scrolling facebook.. But for anything with writing involved, or.. input in general.. for any period of time.. I'll never be that hip, and I get that I'm "in the wrong", but that does not change my opinion that what the world needs is more stationary workstations with l…

> for any period of time

I assume you mean any significant amount of time. I often write something quick on mobile, which works okay. However if it is more than a sentence or two give me a keyboard. The mobile is with me all the time though, my nice desktop with a full sized keyboard, large monitors and all that is back at home. Thus the compromise of often using mobile to write even though it is overall a worse experience.

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

#216

Post by hansel_der »

jasfi wrote: post #149
divan wrote: post #107

Web dev community should just acknowledge the simple fact that typesetting engine from 80s (HTML) and legacy hacks built around it (css and js) is not a good foundation for making modern apps. It's like trying to build apps with a spreadsheet cells (it's actually possible, but we don't do it, thankfully) by throwing a lot of abstractions and frameworks on top of it that would hide the ugliness of the foundation layer…

Flutter provides another option. The only issue is an initial load time on the web, but with a fiber connection it's not too long to download.

"fibre connection" does not tell anything about how fast it is unfortunately.

on a related note; iirc average internet connection has around 100ms rtt, 20mbps down, 1mbps up, 500ms fifo buffering and .5% packet loss. optimise for this if you want more marketshare than city dwellers near us costlines.

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

#217

Post by wizofaus »

ratww wrote: post #181
wizofaus wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious why you suggest all JS build tools suck... previous company I was at had .NET, Java (backend), golang, iOS, Android and JS (react) builds, that all compiled, ran unit tests, packaged and deployed to relevant targets. The react build was the least problematic by far (though we did get bitten on upgrading the host OS which upgraded node to a version incompatible certain older packages being used, but it didn't…

"Suck" doesn't mean "worse compared to others". It means it has problems by itself that I would prefer not having to deal with. Ideally we'd need no build tools for JS. Except for JSX, modern browsers are mature enough. Other languages build tools are often terrible too, the only one I actually enjoy is probably Cargo. As for the real answer: for trivial stuff, all build tools work fine. For anything beyond that they…

What's a language for which you don't think build tools "suck" then? Btw another data point is the C++ open source project I contribute to regularly, where I continually have all manner of problems with local debug builds (the CI builds are generally OK except for being unbearably slow, and it's a single desktop application!).

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

#218

Post by honkdaddy »

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…

Airtable, Draw.io, Google Docs, and Photopea are all incredibly well-made web apps that are essentially complete products without any major flaws I can think of. Those were just the first four to come to mind, there are countless countless other wonderfully engineered full featured applications which run totally in your browser. It’s actually a bit of a marvel, when you think about it.

There are great web apps and there are great native apps. I think what the author is asking for here is just “better software” and well, wouldn’t we all love that :)

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

#219

Post by strken »

simonh wrote: post #188
strken wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the argument is different. Let's say you use a basic HTML Golang app backed by SQLite and replicated to a secondary with Litestream, all running on cheap bare metal ARM servers, and therefore your website is simple, usable, never goes down, and costs $20/month to run. I have no idea if this is actually good, but let's agree that there's some idealised system out there that would be a lot better than what we h…

>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…

> That's a complete non-sequitur.

It doesn't need to sequitur. You disagree with the (unimportant, arbitrary, and probably wrong) choice of "good" technology, for the (valid, fair, and important) reason of scalability. This is fine: whether a specific technology is fit for a hypothetical purpose is irrelevant to what I believe the article is saying.

I don't read the article as saying "never talk about the technology behind scalability on HN or anywhere else," I read it as saying "people learn scalability from exemplars, so the way you improve overall scalability is by finding better examples, not discussing what's already out there."

The reason we have use-cases of Kafka scaling is because LinkedIn[0] needed durable distributed pubsub, so they built it. When the linked article was written it was handling 500 billion events a day. That was kind of cool, because 500 billion is a big number, but also kind of shocking, because that was 68 daily events for each human being alive at the time. Perhaps in 2022 with the hindsight of the last decade, someone with different problems and priorities could approach scalability from a different angle and come up with something else that works better for them.

[0] https://engineering.linkedin.com/architecture/brief-history-...

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

#220

Post by kiawe_fire »

lawgimenez wrote: post #39

I'm a little confused on the article. I remember developing web apps where I could just start a LAMP on my machine but times have changed and we should accept that everything is getting complicated. He should try mobile development, it's much more worse in my opinion. I'm a mobile dev fyi.

Honestly, I find it more than a little ironic that the author is arguing against single-page web apps and then praises native apps as “doing it right”.

Native apps are built and run in a way FAR closer to how single page web apps work in that the browser becomes the runtime environment and the server becomes mostly just an API.

And you are not likely to ever see the kind of fluid results from a traditional full page render web app that you do in mobile.

And mobile at this point has more edge cases to develop for than modern browsers.

But the difference is, as I see it, there’s way less bickering on mobile over “the right way” because most developers use the native stack and instead of complaining about everything they think is hard, they roll up their sleeves and build a good product.

Maybe if we all stopped whining about single page apps being hard and started worrying about making a great product, then we too could match the quality of a nice native app built by devs like yourself.

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