I’m done with the web • Hacker News Board

Re: I’m done with the web

#151

Post by npsimons » Thu, Mar 21, 2013, 5:44 PM UTC

MatthewPhillips wrote: post #104

hackinthebochs wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's almost as if you've drunk your own kool-aid. >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 w…

Being ubiquitous is a merit .

Which is one of the strongest selling points of Emacs and Vim. Ubiquitous doesn't equate to web based; there are plenty of native apps that are ubiquitous, and on top of that they don't require a constant network connection, or that the server is up. It also seems to me that if you have the source, you can get the software running just about anywhere.

Re: I’m done with the web

#152

Post by jwkellyiii » Thu, Mar 21, 2013, 5:45 PM UTC

Giant d-bag post. Not going to rehash the technical side, it has already been stated. I am going to jump on this:

"This trend really favors front end web developers, who tend to not have a software engineering background."

That is an egotistical, asinine comment. ANyone that thinks that has no clue. Wake up. I have a computer science degree with 10+ years of development experience. So fuck you man. I prefer front-end development as do thousands of others with the same background. That doesn't make me less of a dev than you. Get off your high horse.

Re: I’m done with the web

#153

Post by effn » Thu, Mar 21, 2013, 5:46 PM UTC

pifflesnort wrote: post #62

corresation wrote: post #35

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…

> 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…

Most desktop applications that where written for the desktop back in the 90's and early 00's where boring internal business stuff, not well known shrink-wrapped stuff such as MS Office.

Today, almost all that development has moved to the web.

Re: I’m done with the web

#154

Post by zoul » Thu, Mar 21, 2013, 5:46 PM UTC

cromwellian wrote: post #147

The biggest problem with Web Development today, IMHO, and the biggest reason why people desire Widget frameworks in the first place, is that the modern browser rendering pipeline is too complex for most people to understand. If you want to create an app which can consistently animate or scroll at 60fps, avoid jank, and random hiccups, and do cross-platform between WebKit, Firefox, and IE9/10, you will find it enormou…

The biggest problem with Web Development today, IMHO, and the biggest reason why people desire Widget frameworks in the first place, is that the modern browser rendering pipeline is too complex for most people to understand.

It’s a huge mistake to consider Cappuccino a “widget framework”. Cappuccino’s main point is providing the whole “web development stack”. You don’t have to care about browser differences, about DOM trees, about HTML. You just write against a sane, modern, high-level API, just as you would on a modern desktop platform. The number of things to keep in your head dramatically decreases. That’s the point.

Re: I’m done with the web

#155

Post by npsimons » Thu, Mar 21, 2013, 5:47 PM UTC

jbigelow76 wrote: post #85

vyrotek wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>I feel the true 'reboot' and memory loss happened with native mobile apps. How did we ever think this would be a good idea? Native apps weren't a good idea for innovative reasons or to push boundaries of what's achievable, they were a good idea for business reasons: vendor and platform lock in.

And yet web apps don't seem to solve vendor lockin either; see Facebook, Twitter and most recently (and poignantly) Google Reader. And before you mention that people were able to move from Google Reader to something else, you might want to consider it was because it was based on an open protocol (RSS) that wasn't tied to either native or web.

Re: I’m done with the web

#156

Post by georgemcbay » Thu, Mar 21, 2013, 5:50 PM UTC

josteink wrote: post #122

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…

Every time I see someone talking about using JavaScript as working "on the raw metal" I die a little bit inside.

I'm joining OP's web haters club, if he starts one.

Re: I’m done with the web

#157

Post by Zelphyr » Thu, Mar 21, 2013, 5:51 PM UTC

If the goal of "micro JS" truly is file size then yes, that's focusing on the wrong problem. To me the idea behind it is to have a bunch of little tools that do one thing really well. When those tools are combined you have something very powerful, flexible, testable, and reasonably decoupled. Not perfect. Nothing ever is. But better than having to use a massive framework and do everything the framework way in which case you're just working for the framework rather than it working for you. In my experience that is ALWAYS the case with a framework.

Put another way, Unix has been so popular for so long in part because it prefers the "a set of tools that do only one thing but do it really well" philosophy over a framework.

Re: I’m done with the web

#158

Post by cromwellian » Thu, Mar 21, 2013, 5:53 PM UTC

zoul wrote: post #154

cromwellian wrote: post #147

The biggest problem with Web Development today, IMHO, and the biggest reason why people desire Widget frameworks in the first place, is that the modern browser rendering pipeline is too complex for most people to understand. If you want to create an app which can consistently animate or scroll at 60fps, avoid jank, and random hiccups, and do cross-platform between WebKit, Firefox, and IE9/10, you will find it enormou…

The biggest problem with Web Development today, IMHO, and the biggest reason why people desire Widget frameworks in the first place, is that the modern browser rendering pipeline is too complex for most people to understand. It’s a huge mistake to consider Cappuccino a “widget framework”. Cappuccino’s main point is providing the whole “web development stack”. You don’t have to care about browser differences, about DO…

I understand how Cappuccino works (I am one of the GWT authors, and I often have to tell people the same about GWT, is it not a "widget framework"), but what I'm saying is, from what I observe, people often spend more time debugging CSS and HTML than they do code.

There are lots of reasons why JS needs fixing, I'm onboard with that. But honestly, you could fix it 100%, and it would still be easier to develop native apps on iOS/Android. 280 North's Slides for example as a great example of what you could do, but let's not kid ourselves, it was also pretty slow.

If you look at the herculean efforts the Google Docs team went through to get that running fast, and it's still not fast enough, I'd say there's there a lot more work do be done on the Web-as-app-UI-renderer model side.

If it weren't for all of the other things you'd have to reinvent, and what you'd lose from indexability and transparency, I'd almost say built a framework on using WebGL rendering.

Re: I’m done with the web

#159

Post by vyrotek » Thu, Mar 21, 2013, 5:53 PM UTC

pifflesnort wrote: post #64

vyrotek wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Why can't we have icons that just launch a specific URL? Because then App Stores wouldn't make any money then would they? 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…

I think Palm & WebOS were on the right track by making their native apps still based on web technnologies. As far as I know there weren't any mobile inputs that those apps couldn't handle. Blaming limitations on tech seems silly. The decision was a business one.

Besides that, why take away the ability to create webbased apps? Could we not have the option if I know I don't care about any of the fancy stuff. There are so many apps out there these days which are just shells of an app with a WebView inside. It feels a bit ridiculous to have to buy Apple hardware to make a shell and then use our preferred dev environment to develop the site/internals of the app.

Re: I’m done with the web

#160

Post by tixocloud » Thu, Mar 21, 2013, 5:54 PM UTC

This feels like a classic case of great product but poor marketing. The learning curve is a critical piece to adoption rates. When developers shun the framework, it's probably because it does not provide sufficient visible benefit for them to warrant going through the troubles of learning the framework. Once everyone gets onboard with jQuery, it's going to be hard to get people to switch over no matter how great Cappuccino simply because those people do not see the benefits outweighing the costs of switching.

It's also a chicken and egg problem. I'm going to go on a hunch and say there are way more developers who know jQuery than ones who know Cappuccino. Naturally, people would prefer using jQuery because it's easier to get someone else on board for projects.

I really loved the look and feel of Cappuccino and kudos to you for a tremendous effort! Unfortunately, I did not choose to use the framework precisely because I had to learn something called Objective J and for that, I'm sorry that I am part of the group of people who felt that the learning curve was abit steep.