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I’m done with the web

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Re: I’m done with the web

#181

Post by [deleted] »

rocky1138 wrote: post #175
criley wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" I die a little bit inside. " 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 conde…

Well, to start, it's a scripting language, not a compiled language. At least on the web.

[deleted]

Re: I’m done with the web

#182

Post by drbawb »

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.

40 seconds on my MacBook Pro.

Most of the time was spent downloading "AppKit.sj" which is ~2.6MiB, though, and my internet is pretty slow.

Re: I’m done with the web

#183

Post by randomdata »

cromwellian wrote: post #158
zoul wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

> I'd almost say built a framework on using WebGL rendering.

I've had that thought many times. But then I start to wonder why bother with the web browser at all? It begins to look like a pointless abstraction. In many ways, it already is.

Re: I’m done with the web

#184

Post by haddr »

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…

although it seems to be "yet another web framework", be careful when you try to reject it only because of that.

Web frameworks happen because people try to leverage their existing knowledge, skills or codebase in a web domain.

i.e. GWT & Vaadin are web frameworks where you use java and there is literally no need to know JS/HTML/CSS to create some really nice web apps that perform well.

I don't want to say that you don't need JS/HTML/CSS knowlede to build web app. But those frameworks allow people to be productive with almost no such skills.

Re: I’m done with the web

#185

Post by trapezor »

rocky1138 wrote: post #175
criley wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" I die a little bit inside. " 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 conde…

Well, to start, it's a scripting language, not a compiled language. At least on the web.

Javascript is to the web what assembler is for hardware.

Re: I’m done with the web

#186

Post by derefr »

anigbrowl wrote: post #128
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…

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…

> 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.

Have you ever tried a Chrome Platform App? They don't have any browser chrome--they're just regular app windows, painted with whatever the developer likes--but they're still running in a browser. Sort of similar to Air/Silverlight.

Re: I’m done with the web

#187

Post by NikolaTesla »

I feel as though everyone is leaving out a huge part of why the web has won. For the most part it's free. The world developed muscle memory that 'installed' cost money and web access was free. Not the only reason it won but a big one.

Re: I’m done with the web

#188

Post by cromwellian »

cromwellian wrote: post #158
zoul wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

I think different people have different concepts of what smooth and buttery feels like. Native apps have taught people to expect a mostly constant fixed 30fps or 60fps. As smooth as you think Slides was, I doubt it achieved this, because the tooling neccessary to monitor repaint regions and framerates, not to mention GPU compositing, wasn't available in 2008.

DOM programming is still a minefield. GPU compositing tricks is not only not fully portable between browser rendering engines, they aren't even fully portable across GPUs, as differing GPU restrictions like maximum texture size, texture memory, et al, impose different limitations on the maximize size of composited regions, how many can animate or update at once, etc.

Re: I’m done with the web

#189

Post by wting »

Irregardless wrote: post #149

> Google Now is one of the most exciting pieces of technology I’ve seen in a long time. It’s solving problems that couldn’t be solved four years ago. Showing people sports scores and traffic reports before they ask for them? Well, at least that gives us an accurate picture of your perspective (or lack thereof). The Galaxy Nexus is the best phone I've ever used or owned, but I couldn't possibly care less about Now. It…

Your (lack of) use of Google Now is unrelated to the difficulty of the problem.

Predictive analytics is an interesting engineering challenge, and is probably what appeals to the author. On the other hand, re-solving the same web problems repeatedly is not.

Re: I’m done with the web

#190

Post by visualcsharp »

justinph wrote: post #43

Perhaps we've reached the point of too many layers of abstraction. The web is designed for simple hyperlinked documents with some media elements. We've done a pretty good job of adding more stuff to it than that, but that doesn't mean it has proven wise or elegant.

This is precisely why I wrote my .NET routing framework, JuniorRoute (http://projects.nathanalden.com/JuniorRoute ). I was tired of cumbersome MVC abstractions (ASP.NET MVC, FubuMVC) that don't fit the nature of HTTP. Some abstraction tends to be necessary, but I believe the MVC architecture is not appropriate for server-side Web development. We need frameworks that get us closer to the metal rather than introducing paradigms that don't fit with the browser/HTTP world we live in.
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