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Changing times for web developers
121–130 of 147 posts
Re: Changing times for web developers
#122Pretty good list. Some comments here mention this is obvious or dated, but I think that in the wild a lot of devs aren't doing these things. I think there are still a lot of back-end devs which this very much applies to. If you are a back-end dev who has been able to get away with not knowing CSS (and possibly even JS) well, then you need to fix that deficiency. For example, I typically work with a team of developers…
I've wondered about client-side MVC. What level of UI complexity justifies it's use?
I would suggest that you should start applying MVC practises as soon as you start adding Javascript to your page. You don't necessarily need a complex framework, so long as you stick to the separation of concerns.
Re: Changing times for web developers
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is no future in GWT. Even Google is running away from it and is working on Dart now. Having worked with GWT for some time, it's a subpar model. Perhaps it's a flawed execution of the concept, but it has extremely long compilation times, the development mode crawls (so developing with it is slow)--at least for a sizable project. Furthermore, it's not as easy to use external JS libraries (you have to create wrapp…
>> There is no future in GWT. I think there is. This doesn't look like the site of a failing project: https://developers.google.com/web-toolkit/ >> but it has extremely long compilation times, the development mode crawls When you go to create the deployment package it's slow. When doing development, which is most of the time, it's fast to me. I can change things in the client or server code, save and see the results…
While I think GWT is a pretty good project and has some way to go before it can be categorized as failing, some of your other remarks make me think that you have not given appropriate consideration to the alternatives to its approach.
First and foremost, you can write javascript in such a way that your code does nothing weird and only what you intended. A good place to start is still "JavaScript: The Good Parts"[1]. Then I suggest finding some examples of nicely written javascript code on GitHub or some such site. I personally think underscore.js[2] and backbone.js[3] are rather nice.
If you have really given javascript a fair shot, and still strongly dislike it, there are many other languages that compile into javascript, but match its style more closely that Java does. I have been enjoying working in CoffeScript[4]. There is an excellent interactive book[5] that shows the javascript generated by the constructs in the language, which is also a good resource for discovering idioms to do things that are not obvious in javascript, like creating classes. TypeScript[6] and Dart[7] are both interesting languages with syntax more familiar to Java. There are a lot more languages that compile to javascript that I haven't mentioned[8].
It's possible that GWT and Java are the best fit for you, but don't pigeonhole yourself by thinking that they are the only good options out there.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/JavaScript-Good-Parts-Douglas-Crockfor... [2] https://github.com/documentcloud/underscore/blob/master/unde... [3] https://github.com/documentcloud/backbone/blob/master/backbo... [4] http://coffeescript.org/ [5] http://arcturo.github.com/library/coffeescript/02_syntax.htm... [6] http://www.typescriptlang.org/ [7] http://www.dartlang.org/ [8] https://github.com/jashkenas/coffee-script/wiki/List-of-lang...
Re: Changing times for web developers
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, but when great web developers on HN are a dime a dozen, I don't want to waste time on content that isn't polished.
The biggest irony: the HN site itself can hardly be considered 'polished'. I mean it still uses the tag!
But it displays fine on the iPhone (and probably on many other devices and browsers). So, for its purpose it functions reasonably well.
Re: Changing times for web developers
#125Agree with half, but don't worry about: JS MVC frameworks: MVC in JS is almost always overkill. HTML5: Most of the web doesn't have support for it yet. Optimization: Sure, but don't preoptimize so rather go looking for the tools once your app tells you it's slow. Also minified JS is great to save a tiny bit of bandwidth and obfuscate, but damn it's a pain to debug your live site.
> "HTML5: Most of the web doesn't have support for it yet." Say what? You probably meant to say "most of the internet explorer installed base doesn't have support for it" which is a far, far cry from "most of the web".
Yeah, but IE is huge. It really is, and I wouldn't have believed it before I started working on a large site in Europe (approx 900K uniques per day). At least a third of our visitors are using IE, sometimes even IE8 or 7 (we've finally gotten rid of 6).
I often wonder who these people are, and then I talk to my boss, who uses IE8 and complains constantly that we all use Chrome (on Windows, FF for the win on a decent machine/machine running Linux). So yeah, unfortunately, if you're doing ecommerce for ordinary people, you're stuck with supporting IE and the whole host of issues that entails. Seriously, 100char limit? WTF Microsoft, fix that already.
Re: Changing times for web developers
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
But here's the thing: CSS is a stone soup of non-local, action-at-distance effects -- it's "goto" programming. HTML lacks decent layout primitives (border layout, grid layout) because it's a document-oriented abstraction. It's just really obnoxious to get a single screen application look working correctly on all browsers. So, I'd welcome a reimplementation of, say, WPF on canvas. Something that works without Microsof…
CSS is not that hard. Many developers simply put off doing it at any cost, then throw together a messy unorganized stylesheet and blame the language. I'll agree with you on the layout shortcomings, such as using excessive floats etc. But once flexbox is fully implemented as a standard, this will become much easier.
> CSS is not that hard.
It is not hard, it is just not fit for laying out UI because it is was not developed with this purpose in mind. CSS3/flexbox is an afterthought attempt to fix that.
Re: Changing times for web developers
#1277. Progressive Enhancement. It should be mentioned more, the current trend of tech is leaving it behind, for no good reason... There should at least be a debate on it... but it seems it's in the "Too hard" basket right now.
does make sense for a website , doesnt make sense for a web app.
Why not? Should web apps require javascript? Shouldn't the be usable even when javascript is unavailable.
Re: Changing times for web developers
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
What aspect of HTML5 isn't yet ready for mainstream? JS polyfills make almost all of it possible for the ~4% of global IE7 users (according to the site above... no idea how accurate it is). Just using modernizer, json2.js, and underscore enables about 90% of the HTML5 feature set for IE7. Raphael, excanvas (or whatever) and accepting the lack of drop-shadows/rounded corners in shitty browsers make up the rest. Seriou…
maybe it depends on how you view the specs, but I think what most people mean by HTML5 is the full spectrum of new features outside markup that enable app building, ie. filesystem API, Websockets, web workers, webgl, etc, which is to no where near getting a 90% coverage even by using tons of shims/libs. just browse this site to see how far along HTML5 is: http://caniuse.com/
Yeah, fair enough, it's a moving target. Two years ago when people said HTML5 wasn't ready for prime time they were talking about audio and video tags, canvas, SVG, CSS media queries, and websockets (which, by the way, are pretty usable with a shim like socket.io or sockJS). Now those things are all more or less feasible across browsers with some (or a lot) of JS (localStorage and the app cache can also be used as long as they're not relied on, which is a reasonable long term strategy for most web apps anyway) but web workers and webgl have picked up steam since then. If we keep moving the HTML5 goalpost (I've given up on paying attention to the spec), it will never be ready for production use.
I guess I'm only saying this because the HTML5 brand has created enormous confusion in the marketplace. That's largely because it was touted as "the replacement for Flash" and my point is that it is already quite capable of doing that in most cases.
Re: Changing times for web developers
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "HTML5: Most of the web doesn't have support for it yet." Say what? You probably meant to say "most of the internet explorer installed base doesn't have support for it" which is a far, far cry from "most of the web".
Like all the remaining browsers if you really need to cover a wide array of devices, operating systems and browsers. Web development is pretty much code once, fix everywhere.
Web development is pretty much code once, fix everywhere.
I'm tweeting this. Brilliant.
Re: Changing times for web developers
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree with the gist or your post, but as others have pointed out, GWT is essentially depricated and really not the right direction to go. I think the angle that TypeScript is taking may prove to be more fruitful.
>> GWT is essentially depricated and really not the right direction to go. Where does it say that on the GWT site? https://developers.google.com/web-toolkit/
At this years Google IO they hinted that GWT is going to be ported to Dart.
How that will change GWT's future is anyone's guess.