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I’m done with the web

randyluecke.tumblr.com

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Re: I’m done with the web

#71

Post by mixmastamyk »

martinced wrote: post #34

I'm sorry about the harsh tone of my other comment (most upvoted comment so far) but the tone of the author is aggressive so... 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…

Out of curiosity I just looked at the Cappucino website... the controls look modern to me, not like "old, outdated, Windows.. Swing" apps.

Re: I’m done with the web

#72

Post by pifflesnort »

smacktoward wrote: post #29
jacquesm wrote: post #2

> 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's more like the ease of Web programming opened up programming to an entire new slice of the population that would never have had the opportunity to become programmers before. These people don't have computer science degrees, so they spend a lot of time reinventing wheels. But lots of it works well enough despite all that, and as time passes, they learn and get better. The messiness is a good sign, not a bad one. T…

> Thirty years ago these people would have had no options other than to be passive consumers of software other people made.

Not exactly: https://groups.google.com/group/comp.sys.mac.hypercard/brows...

(That was 26 years ago, and HyperCard was far more accessible to non-computer scientists than the web is or has been).

It's a mistake to think that because the web is popular, that one can draw directly from it axioms regarding how technology should be implemented.

Re: I’m done with the web

#73

Post by deepuj »

The end objective of web development is to bring desktop like experience? I wouldn't blame the failure of Cappuccino on the emergence of micro libraries. Cappuccino simply does not sound like what the web needs.

Re: I’m done with the web

#74

Post by masklinn »

Cushman wrote: post #9
rolleiflex wrote: post #5

>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…

Perhaps someone forgot to multiply by 8.

And didn't take delays in account, half a second used to be my ping on dial-up.

Re: I’m done with the web

#75

Post by biznickman »

This has to be one of the most bitter and condescending posts ever. Rather than sucking up the fact that a project he has been putting his heart and soul for some reason isn't gaining traction (and trying to adjust so that it can), he blames "the web community" for all his issues. The community doesn't have a centralized decision making system, instead, people support things that make sense. In this case, they didn't support Cappuccino, because it didn't make sense to them. Rather than blaming themselves though, they blame the masses. The conclusion "screw you all, I'm joining Google" is really abrasive and arrogant. It would have been much better if this post was phrased as: for some reason our platform didn't work, here's what we learned.

Re: I’m done with the web

#77

Post by edman »

I think that this guy does not really understand how the web works. I mean, emulating desktop on the web has been tried many times and failed each time. He's right about some things (like people considering 49KB to be a lot) though.

Re: I’m done with the web

#78

Post by fusiongyro »

While I agree with the main thrust of the article, in my opinion what killed Cappuccino was that it was big, weird, and rather opaque. Did it ever occur to you that maybe it was just too much? One thing I liked about jQuery was that my webpages didn't have to become applications, they could just be webpages with behavior. It worked within the paradigm, you might say, and that's what I wanted and it's what my clients wanted too. SproutCore didn't see heavy adoption either. GWT probably had more than both, but it wasn't the #1 or #2 Java framework.

I wanted to love Cappuccino, but I didn't know Cocoa or Objective-C. Your team was spread so thin I remember wondering--how much time are they putting into Objective-J, how much into Cappuccino, how much into 280 Slides? When 280 Slides shut down, it looked to me (as an outsider) as the beginning of the inevitable cascade of plug-pulling that happens when a small team realizes they bit off more than they can chew. Imagine what it would have done to Rails adoption if Basecamp had been shut down. It was the flagship product.

It's hard to imagine jQuery being shut down, but suppose it did. With Zepto and everything else, it wouldn't be the end of the world for me--my investment in it is safe. Imagine if I had written tens of thousands of lines of Objective-J. Does this blog post make me feel like I made a safe investment? We like light libraries over massive frameworks because light libraries really can't take our applications down with them. You may have brought an impressive engineering mindset to this problem, and this is a problem that deserves it, but we're still talking about 4 years from start to finish. If you want me to go "all in" on something that could take years of my work down in a ball of flame, forgive me if I'm distrustful of three kids doing a startup and trying to reinvent the world.

Re: I’m done with the web

#79

Post by pifflesnort »

npsimons wrote: post #67
johnbender wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Second this; while I'm not a web dev, I do bump into it occasionally, and it pains me any time I see someone re-re-re-inventing the wheel, often badly. I don't know about Obj-J or Cappuccino, but just the OP's comments about modules had me nodding in agreement. 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 wa…

> 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?

SQLite is native C, H2 is Java. There are significant deployment and potential stability advantages to not using native binaries in your Java software.

There have been some neat hacks to get sqlite running under Java, including using a tool that translates MIPS binaries to run under the JVM, allowing the use of libsqlite as 'native Java' code: http://nestedvm.ibex.org/

This is, however, not something you'd likely want to use unless you absolutely need to interoperate with sqlite's data format.

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