61–70 of 291 posts
It's not about loading time, it's about bloat.
This reaction to Ember just baffles me. Your day job is to build a piece of web software and you can’t take a few days to learn the ins and outs?
Sure but when there are alternatives which you can jump into right away with the same good results, why waste two days?
> 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…
It is as if with the birth of the web there was a complete reboot of the IT industry 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…
It won what, exactly? The war against Gopher for presentation of hypertext documents and information display? There's more to heaven and earth than data presentation and consumption.
The examples of genuinely great web applications are few and far between, if not near non-existent. Are Google Apps really the best the web has to offer?
Cappuccino provided one example of how to move the browser past the shackles of the traditional HTML/JS/CSS and into a world where developers could work with more accurate abstractions that actually represented the problem domains of application development.
This lesson has essentially been ignored, tossing out 3+ decades of experience our industry has in building applications.
A common use case for web apps is to allow for collaboration and/or sharing (e.g. Basecamp, Github....). When you look at the tutorials for Cappuccino you can quickly find out how to make an image editing app, but if you want to find out how to do even basic stuff (for web apps) like saving data to a backend, you have to search really hard.
In addition to that, Cappuccino always looked somewhat immature - even now the home page is somewhat broken. You don't want to bet on a new framework AND a completely new language when it looks immature.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is as if with the birth of the web there was a complete reboot of the IT industry 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…
I feel the true 'reboot' and memory loss happened with native mobile apps. How did we ever think this would be a good idea? As you mentioned, the unique inputs seemed to have temporarily blinded us to real progress we've made with the web. Why can't web-based apps accept all these inputs as well? The other big problem we have is that we're stuck with this idea of having cute little icons to launch things. Why can't w…
That's what iOS 1.0 did. There were no native apps, just web apps that had cute icons that launched a specific URL.
People tried very hard to make that work. It didn't. The breadth and depth of mobile applications we see today only occurred once Apple provided a native SDK.
The reasons for this are simply technical ones.
> 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…
It is as if with the birth of the web there was a complete reboot of the IT industry 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…
>And they all fell by the wayside. They lacked in features. They lacked in agility.
No, no and no. The web "won" because its simple and the lowest common denominator was good enough for most people. The web has always been far behind in terms of features and agility (depending on what you're trying to optimize when it comes to agility). The web won solely because it was "open" and every company had a stake in ensuring no one company could sustain their monopoly. The web sucks and it did not win on its merits.
This is a big part of why I left Web dev, too. I'm just sick of working with amateurs. When I'm at work, I have things I want to get done. This isn't the classroom, my teammates' lack of comprehension of even things as simple as dependency injection and MVC is their fault, not mine. My productivity and coding power shouldn't have to be hampered just because I'm working with a bunch of code-until-it-works-sorta hacks.
I'm so relieved to hear that there are no amateur native developers. Gives me a warm, fuzzy feeling inside.
The desktop is not cool or hip, so the people doing it tend to be people who really want to be there, not chasing trends. It's a vast oversimplification of the situation, sure.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 read the post differently. 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 import…
Another related example, I recently learned of H2 (http://www.h2database.com/html/main.html) and I honestly had to ask myself, why is this needed? If you want an embedded SQL DB why not just use SQLite? If you want a full featured enterprise SQL DB, why not just use PostgreSQL? And don't even get me started about Walyand/Mir as opposed to Xorg, or the whole debacle of disabling separate /usr because of rewriting things like init to use glib and other non-base system dependencies. The hubris, lack of knowledge of history, lack of foresight, and just plain lack of professionalism (to put it politely) are staggering.
1. I have to learn Objective-J. I've been web programming for years and I've become really good at Javascript. I even enjoy it. Other frameworks don't require learning a new language.
2. Time spent learning Cappuccino is only good for programming Cappuccino apps. Time spent in micro frameworks generally translates to other frameworks. Backbone is so bare-metal that it is very easy for Javascript programmer to feel comfortable.
3. Batteries-included frameworks often have "their" way of doing things that are not extensible. This can lead to awkward situations where you need behavior that is just not possible without monkey-patching the hell out of the frameworks and getting yourself stuck on a particular version.
4. I can't speak to Cappuccino, but a similar framework, ExtJS, has (for 4 major versions and nearly 10 years) lacked a build and minification system that didn't suck. This means you must include all dependencies, leading to 1.2MB+(minified!) blobs of JS that can take upwards of 10 seconds or more to load even on fast connections. For business-class apps running on B2B contracts, that might be fine. For public-facing webapps, this is murder.
5. People like micro frameworks because they can use every brand new & shiny piece of JS that shows up on the web without worrying about compatibility. And they can use {HTML5 feature} without worrying about compatibility. I'm sure Cappuccino does a better job than most when it comes to this sort of thing, but what happens when the devs lose interest? Years of "Objective-J" experience go to waste.
Yet we conveniently forget that loading just a few images will quickly surpass that 49K of code. It's not about loading time, it's about bloat. This reaction to Ember just baffles me. Your day job is to build a piece of web software and you can’t take a few days to learn the ins and outs? Sure but when there are alternatives which you can jump into right away with the same good results, why waste two days?
As somebody who uses text interfaces primarily I don't think desktop apps are amazing anyway, even if I see that they are better for some tasks.
The web browser is the only graphical tool I use daily, I don't need things inside to look like desktop apps. shudder