161–170 of 291 posts
Something else I wonder about is what this increasing focus on JS is doing to accessibility. Many sites won't even render with JS turned off; the no-JS version of them are only optimized for search robots - not human beings who rely on accessibility tools! Is it just me, or is this so-called development moving us farther away from good accessibility instead of closer?
Personally, batteries-included frameworks like Cappuccino scare me off for a few reasons: 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 frame…
Objective-J is a Javascript superset, so everything you know about Javascript is still available to you. It will take minutes to learn the additions. The language is not really the problem.
Its the framework that will take quite some time to learn. There are a ton of interfaces to work with. I suspect that is why you feel more comfortable with something like Backbone, because it basically brings nothing to the table, so there is very little to learn.
> Time spent learning Cappuccino is only good for programming Cappuccino apps.
Not exactly. The API is nearly identical to Cocoa on the Mac, and very similar to Cocoa Touch on iOS. If you know any of the three, you should be able to transition between the frameworks without much trouble. You can even use Apple's own Interface Builder to build your Cappuccino interfaces, to give you some idea of how similar they really are. There is also GNUStep, but that's probably not a big selling point, granted.
Perhaps the time spent is less valuable if you have no interaction with Apple devices, but I suspect a lot of people interested in web development also have an interest in mobile development where knowing how to develop for iOS does have quite a bit of value.
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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.
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> 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…
I do many of these things in a browser as well, not because the experience is so great, in fact, most of the time it's pretty horrible. Banking, photo management or video conferencing in the browser a great experience, really?
I sympathise with this article, and even though web applications have come a long way, I'm sometimes amazed by the collective cognitive dissonance that seems to be prevalent among people who develop web applications, pretending that all is fine and dandy in web application land, and we've long surpassed the point where web applications provide better experience than good native applications. They are simply nowhere near, and the fact that e.g. Google Mail (which is a great web application) is considered superior to e.g. something like Sparrow is quite frankly very amazing.
Randy, if you happen to read this: ignore the nay-sayers. There will never been a universal agreement on what the best technology is to get a job done. And there will always be people who try to troll your approach. That doesn't devalue your approach. Just build cool stuff with it, and be happy.
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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.
Every time I hear a programmer condescend towards other programmers for using a higher level language, I also die a little bit inside.
How is javascript not the "metal" of the web? It's a core part of the modern web experience upon which many libraries and frameworks have been built.
I don't understand why that analogy is bad and is worthy of your condescension.
Are you just being condescending to the entire web paradigm in general?
I really liked Cappuccino. Great features and 280 Slides was/is awesome. I follow its development for quite a long time. Why didn't I use it? - As a complete noob, I found it hard to start (despite having good objc knowledge) - I checked the objj github language page, and didn't saw a lot of activity - Last but not least, Atlas, a Cappuccino IDE was supposed to be released. I tried contacting Tolmasky about where the…
You may want to consider it from that perspective. People are getting interested in client-side frameworks. You laid important groundwork for that. Why not be happy about that?
There will always be a cycle of change in software development. Trust me, you will not find that this pattern changes switching from front-end JS work to backend "native" programming work. The only constant in this world is constant change. If I was not satisfied with that, I would be into something like architectural engineering. When you build a bridge over a river, it lasts for hundreds of years.
That said, I like a lot of the points in the article. I too have noted the absurdity of people complaining about how a 49kb file is "too large". I share the profound confusion of the hyper-simplicity movement, where we trade ~30kb of code for our ability to maintain software, which is a much bigger problem than performance in our industry today.