31–40 of 291 posts
"(Obviously these opinions are my own and of course do not represent the opinions of my future employer)"
He has no real world experience doing anything that matters so just chats about what he's witnessed from within his bubble.
>Ember is very close to the “micro” side of things, but at a “whopping” 49KB (less than a second download on a dial-up internet connection Chances are that you probably never had a dial-up connection. 49KB on dial-up generally takes around 10 seconds. Besides this point, the accusatory tone towards front-end developers and 'the rest of the world' that did not understand you isn't helping to get your point across. You…
The front end "developer" community is awash with web designers who know enough jQuery (not Javascript, jQuery) to sprinkle some woo-woo on "websites", but who have no software engineering skills to create genuine rich, immersive applications.
And they're resentful because rich, immersive applications that require some engineering power, and some necessarily complex APIs are the way things are going.
And these people are noisy and influential.
But I think that's changing. We are going to have properly engineered, web mediated rich UIs. Not a mess of cobbled together freeware.
Now on Cappucino's website I read this:
"Cappuccino is an open source application framework for developing applications that look and feel like the desktop software users are familiar with."
and I can't help but think this is all wrong. There are many (most ?) users who are now familiar with webapps, not desktop apps. And what they want is definitely not a webapp looking like an old, outdated, Windows or Java / Swing app (which is exactly how Cappucino looks like).
What many user wants is webapps that look like webapps and if they are "forced" to use a desktop app, then they want a desktop app looking like a webapp (I'm thinking about the client-side desktop apps embedding a browser + JavaScript engine).
I'm also pretty sure that devs who have done both advanced HTML + CSS to "customize" the UI of their app do much prefer that over, say, the total and utter madness that Swing is (I'm speaking of what I know).
Yes, HTML and CSS have their warts... But you'd have to a masochist to want to create a desktop app using Swing.
Users I'm sure they don't want apps that looks like desktop apps: they now have browsers, iPad, Android tablets, etc. They hardly remember what an old Windows desktop app was like.
Devs I don't know: I've done my fair share of Swing and the last thing I want is go back doing that.
I kinda like this "simple / straight to the point" webapp worlds that we have right now.
> The community has tossed out everything we’ve learned from the last 30 years of building applications in favor of being able to put something together quickly with complete disregard for maintainability or extendability. That's spot on. You can add in to that that all the lessons of the process of developing software have also been discarded and are slowly being re-learned. It is as if with the birth of the web the…
The web won. It fought a battle against many foes, and it came out on top.
Re-read that again and seriously think about it, because comments such as yours don't accept that simple reality. Do you contest it? Do you argue that the web somehow circumvented the competition?
For 15 years I've been promoting the web with groups that I've consulted with or led. For 15 years competitors have arisen with various alternative strategies, including MFC applications, Java Applets and then Web Start solution, .NET Winforms and then .NET WPF applications, Flex and Flash applications, Silverlight applications, and on and on.
And they all fell by the wayside. They lacked in features. They lacked in agility.
The only competitor that has made serious inroads are native apps on mobile devices, eking out an advantage due to the unique profile and unique input techniques of those devices, and of course gaming given that the web had no interest in gaming. The web is adapting.
If the advantages that you hold are true (in another post you argue that we salivate over stuff that was trivial 20 years ago. Yet ignore that we do things on the web that are just incredibly rich with but a few lines of markup and some ancillary code), those apps should have long devastated the web, teams making secure, easy to construct apps that run circles over those poor web developers.
That said, this being butt-hurt about lack of adoption for your pet framework is just fucking overreacting. Yeah, I know, it's your shit, you made it, you're very proud, now it's personal. Bluntly: emulating a recognizable desktop interface in the browser is a shit idea. Your Mac OS emulation on a web browser over my Windows is the web equivalent of James Bond in pajamas. Not to mention that it completely destroys brand identification, and makes legal departments cry.
You wrote some cool stuff, it got you some fame and a job at Google. Stop whining.
> Objective-J
oh yeah
There's no way yet another webapp framework, no matter how close it emulates the desktop, is going to gain lots of traction when it mandates users to use... Objective-J and JavaScript. Seriously: being on your high horses and all is fine and well but your article is an oversimplification as to how the web works and as to what devs need and want. For example lately I've been very interested in flapjax (FRP UI) and web…
This, so much. Randy's probably right about how silly all the tiny reinventions of UI frameworks are. And, though I'm generally unsympathetic to claims that a project is a failure because people don't want to learn the tools, I think it's safe to say here that asking people to use a language that's only marginally less horrible than JavaScript is not going to be a win from any perspective. But he fails to realize tha…
I think he was simply pointing out the fact that we've stagnated at the same level of abstraction in the web space for a long time. Cappuccino is just the example he's using to point out where we were relative to where we are and in that light it's almost a regression.
For the purposes of his larger argument, the way that Cappuccino delivered its abstractions (Objective-J) isn't as important as what it allowed you to do with the web.