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I’m done with the web

randyluecke.tumblr.com

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Re: I’m done with the web

#121

Post by zevyoura »

jacquesm wrote: post #28
danso wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While you've undoubtedly worked at some great shops with other great engineers...can you say that the IT and development industry isn't as rickety as web development seems today? I mean, how can we really know? Today, we have github and stackoverflow and a myriad of other coding boards in which we can see the most horrible of code snippets -- and the way the mind works, we usually remember the horrid examples more th…

I've worked in banking, telco, cad/cam and embedded systems. Nowhere, and I really mean that, was the tech as botched as it has been on the web past the early days.

To be fair, those are all systems with a drastically higher cost of failure than general web development.

Re: I’m done with the web

#122

Post by josteink »

martinced wrote: post #11

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…

There's no way yet another webapp framework, no matter how close it emulates the desktop, is going to gain lots of traction

My objection is right here. No need to mix in the Objective-J at all.

Microsoft's ASP.NET tried to do this thing, to a surprising amount of success. The context then ofcourse was "Web 1.0" pre-Digg internet and the only other "big thing" being PHP.

Microsoft managed to take the whole "Draw a GUI in Visual Studio and it's a done app" thing and take it to the web, much like it originally defined Windows-programming with Visual Basic. It was an immense success and very cool.

Then Web 2.0 (as much as I hate that term) came and changed the game.

Then not working on the raw metal became an obstacle to making ASP.NET do all those cool things which everyone else was doing. It's killer feature (not having to know HTML) became it's Achilles Heel. It's abstractions became a hinderance to all the things you actually knew how to do once the framework got out of your way.

I may be a tad pessimistic and cynical, but I doubt a framework whose main goal is to give you a non-webby workspace will be a long term success when you're actually working on the web.

Microsoft learned that (too late?) and have tried to remedy the situation with ASP.NET MVC, but by the time that became useful, it seems lots of .NET developers went off to find cool stuff elsewhere.

A new framework like that, right now, seems like an utterly dead end.

Re: I’m done with the web

#123

Post by paulirish »

kevincennis wrote: post #24

Kind of surprised to see that this was posted by Paul Irish, considering he's such a huge web evangelist. There are definitely some valid points in the article, but at the end of the day, it's hard for me to accept that The Right Way™ to do web development is to completely abstract away HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

Certainly I live and breathe the web and do everything I can to advocate for its success.

I helped out Randy with this post because I think this perspective is both legit and underheard. Plenty of folks that work tirelessly to improve the web platform share frustration that many developers for the platform don't take it seriously as an application development platform, don't learn from past mistakes, and don't adopt the lessons learned from other platforms.

So honestly I think this painful truth needs to be heard if we expect the web to meet its potential.

Re: I’m done with the web

#124

Post by smacktoward »

pifflesnort wrote: post #105
smacktoward wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm old enough to have used HyperCard, and while it was an excellent environment, it had some serious barriers to entry. For instance, using it required an expensive development kit, namely a Mac. Back in 1987 even a lowly Mac Plus would cost you $2,500, which in today's dollars is more than $5,000. Contrast that to the Web, which you can author for on the oldest, crustiest commodity hardware you please and where eve…

> I'm old enough to have used HyperCard, and while it was an excellent environment, it had some serious barriers to entry. For instance, using it required an expensive development kit, namely a Mac. Back in 1987 even a lowly Mac Plus would cost you $2,500, which in today's dollars is more than $5,000. Contrast that to the Web, which you can author for on the oldest, crustiest commodity hardware you please and where e…

"Any computer was not cheap in 1987, much less one that sported a usable GUI environment that could run something on par with HyperCard. That had nothing to do with HyperCard."

True, but (1) PCs were significantly cheaper than Macs, and (2) many, many more people already had PCs on their desks than had Macs. So unless you were one of the few who already had a Mac, getting started with HyperCard meant plunking down money for new hardware.

"There were far, far fewer people actually running computers, much less collaborating on the internet, 26 years ago."

Again true, but irrelevant. We're talking about contemporary mindshare, and starting in the early '90s HyperCard and the Web were competing against each other in real time. HyperCard had a long head start and yet even by 1995 (the year Netscape 1.0 broke out) it was clear the Web had all the momentum.

"Even still, people were producing "My Favorite Links" and home pages, not apps."

And the buzzed-about HyperCard stacks were always more like presentations than apps. So?

I'm not trying to run down HyperCard here, it was a brilliant, revolutionary product. But I just can't fathom how anyone could think it more accessible to newbies than the Web was at the same time. And the Web has only gotten more accessible in the years since.

Re: I’m done with the web

#125

Post by warfangle »

pifflesnort wrote: post #99
corresation wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's more to heaven and earth than data presentation and consumption. I do my banking in a browser. I do my email in a browser. I manage photos in a browser. I manage relationships in a browser. I do my taxes in a browser. I order goods in a browser. I ship goods in a browser. I reserve items at the library in a browser. I watch movies in a browser. I listen to music in a browser. I push apps to my smartphone in a…

> I do my banking in a browser. I do my email in a browser. I manage photos in a browser. I manage relationships in a browser. I do my taxes in a browser. I order goods in a browser. I ship goods in a browser. I reserve items at the library in a browser. I watch movies in a browser. I listen to music in a browser. I push apps to my smartphone in a browser. I get directions in a browser. I find phone numbers in a brow…

You can push apps to your phone with a native app? Maybe if you're using iOS. You can reserve items at a library with a native app? Which one? I don't know of any; do you? What do you use to manage photos, iPhoto? Is it really that much more powerful than flickr -- or even Facebook?

For many web-based tools, there aren't cappuccino/desktop analogs. They just don't make sense.

Re: I’m done with the web

#126

Post by gfodor »

freehunter wrote: post #66
marknutter wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm so relieved to hear that there are no amateur native developers. Gives me a warm, fuzzy feeling inside.

The point seems to be that the web is cool and hip, which attracts people without computer science backgrounds. Without a solid footing in software design fundamentals, "hack it until it works" seems like a perfectly valid way to run a development cycle. 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 situa…

I don't know about anyone else, but I learned almost nothing about software design when getting my computer science degree.

Re: I’m done with the web

#127

Post by hluska »

pifflesnort wrote: post #105
smacktoward wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm old enough to have used HyperCard, and while it was an excellent environment, it had some serious barriers to entry. For instance, using it required an expensive development kit, namely a Mac. Back in 1987 even a lowly Mac Plus would cost you $2,500, which in today's dollars is more than $5,000. Contrast that to the Web, which you can author for on the oldest, crustiest commodity hardware you please and where eve…

> I'm old enough to have used HyperCard, and while it was an excellent environment, it had some serious barriers to entry. For instance, using it required an expensive development kit, namely a Mac. Back in 1987 even a lowly Mac Plus would cost you $2,500, which in today's dollars is more than $5,000. Contrast that to the Web, which you can author for on the oldest, crustiest commodity hardware you please and where e…

> Even still, people were producing "My Favorite Links" and home pages, not apps.

I first went online in 1991 (so that my friends and I could keep playing Shadowrun all winter) and got into the web in 1993 (I was 16, pictures were a big deal). Back then, there was this sense that the web could be really great, but I don't think many people grasped what it could be used for. Search technology wasn't great, so starting on someone's home page and surfing was how most people explored the web.

The first thing I ever built on the web was a homepage for a Shadowrun character. It was basically walls of text in which I talked about his complete history, and a whole lot of links to gaming resources. Needless to say, I got all the girls in high school....:)

Thanks for taking me down memory lane - sometimes I forget just how incredibly excited I was when I first discovered the online world. Without a hint of hyperbole, I wouldn't be who I am (in fact, I might not even be alive) if not for the web. :)

Re: I’m done with the web

#128

Post by anigbrowl »

corresation wrote: post #82
pifflesnort wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The web won. It fought a battle against many foes, and it came out on top. 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? Cappu…

There's more to heaven and earth than data presentation and consumption. I do my banking in a browser. I do my email in a browser. I manage photos in a browser. I manage relationships in a browser. I do my taxes in a browser. I order goods in a browser. I ship goods in a browser. I reserve items at the library in a browser. I watch movies in a browser. I listen to music in a browser. I push apps to my smartphone in a…

It's awesome for things involving communication and relationships (banking, purchasing, and so forth) and for accessing content (Youtube is my main music discovery service, for example).

But I don't like doing everything in a browser. All the things you mention are transactional, but when I'm (say) writing music I much prefer to be in a native environment because the transactional stuff is a much lower priority. It's distracting, for many tasks. At the very least, I want to run some things without a browser frame of tabs, URL bar and so on without necessarily doing so in full screen mode.

Re: I’m done with the web

#129

Post by mattmanser »

nhebb wrote: post #93

I tried the Aristo showcase ( http://www.cappuccino-project.org/aristo/showcase/ ), and it took 20 seconds to load on high speed internet connection w/ Chrome browser. I can understand developers' reluctance to use such a framework. If you've marketing a web app developed with Cappuccino, you're going to lose a lot of conversions with that kind of wait.

It's an app, I have to wait to download apps.

In fact I often have to wait for Gmail to download too.

They're just not framing the conversation well with the default loading screen. If it said something like 'this will only take a while once', it wouldn't be so bad!

I'm not sure this is a good objection.

Re: I’m done with the web

#130

Post by wilmoore »

hpguy wrote: post #83

Why would I prefer to plug and play (and toss away) micro, modular libraries/frameworks designed to interop or to be independently used instead of using a monolithic technology that pushes to my throat ObjJ, Cocoa and a other contraints that follow (like IE8+ only)? That needs an explanation?

Awww, bless his heart. He forgot to add the #notsohumblebrag tag to his post.
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