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A whole website in a single JavaScript file

deno.com

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Re: A whole website in a single JavaScript file

#121

Post by dustymcp »

irrational wrote: post #100
MuffinFlavored wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> monstrosities why do you have to sprinkle that snark + negativity in there? it implies a toxic role of "you are superior" and "people who use JavaScript to serve static blog content" are inferior. why can't we all just get along? especially in this tight-knit programming community that is supposed to be full of love and collaboration. in today's modern day of inclusion and emphasis on mental health, you're spreadin…

> full of love and collaboration Why do you have to sprinkle that positivity in there? It implies a toxic role of “I am naive”. Ah, I’m just jerking your chain. For the most part I agree with you. Calling the way other people do things a “monstrosity” really is uncalled for.

Having to support these "monstrosities" i cant see it as toxic but merely a way of life..

Re: A whole website in a single JavaScript file

#122

Post by dustymcp »

zamadatix wrote: post #39

Is there a particular advantage to how this is done here with Deno or is this just an example of server side rendering being possible in Deno? The latter is fine as I'm a fan of Deno :) just missing why it's such a popular post (maybe more Deno fans?)

You mean you are a user ? Fans are for music :)

Re: A whole website in a single JavaScript file

#123

Post by mushyhammer »

Rauchg wrote: post #38
sillysaurusx wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ever since Vercel killed `now`'s ability to serve an index.html with `now .`, I stopped being a fan. That and the pricing blunders have unfortunately pushed me away. On the other hand, https://docs.ycombinator.lol/ has been running for years without me ever having to worry once, so there's that. Maybe it's time to give them another try.

That never stopped working. Neither on the edge side (as your live site indicates, which has been edge cached for 109 days in San Francisco), or on the deployment site, as the example below shows: Try it out: https://hi-there.vercel.app ▲ /tmp/ mkdir hi-there ▲ /tmp/ cd hi-there ▲ hi-there/ echo ' hi sillysaurusx ' > index.html ▲ hi-there/ vc […] Inspect: https://vercel.com/rauchg/hi-there [690ms] Production: https:/…

Sorry Guillermo but you’re not being truthful here. “$ now” worked on any node server, not just static content, it would just run “npm start”. Now v2+ instead requires a handler-based approach.

Re: A whole website in a single JavaScript file

#124

Post by giantrobot »

ramesh31 wrote: post #62
giantrobot wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Almost nobody is going to use Deno to serve a basic HTML site with less than a dozen pages, Assumes facts not in evidence. People are already building JavaScript monstrosities to serve entirely static blog content.

>People are already building JavaScript monstrosities to serve entirely static blog content. I think we just have to accept that that's how websites are built now. It drove me nuts for a while, too. But modern JS engines are blindingly fast, and 2-3mb of JS download (that will be cached aggressively) is a non-issue for the vast majority of users. I started talking to a junior developer the other day about server side…

> I think we just have to accept that that's how websites are built now. It drove me nuts for a while, too.

I don't think we should simply accept that's how things are done now.

> I started talking to a junior developer the other day about server side rendering in the days of Rails/PHP/etc. and he looked at me like I was crazy.

A web developer like the one you mention that can't even conceive of server side rendering makes them a bad web developer. That lack of core understanding means they have no idea how a web browser works and only view the world through JavaScript. They have no concept of progressive enhancement.

So this means they'll likely spend the next five years poorly implementing features a web browser already has. They're going to make websites, er "apps", that won't work properly in micro browsers. Hyperlinks won't work or will be flakey enough to might as well not work. And best of all their stuff won't work on entry level devices that are extremely popular.

> But modern JS engines are blindingly fast, and 2-3mb of JS download (that will be cached aggressively) is a non-issue for the vast majority of users.

You say this but it's not the common case. A lot of people have shitty devices because they're cheap. Whether they're entry level phones or shitty bullpen office systems people everywhere are stuck with them.

No matter how fast Chrome might execute some JITed inner loop is immaterial when the next line adds the DOM's billionth div pretending to be a button.

Thanks to cargo culting CI/CD there's little guarantee some app is going to reference the same JavaScript file on different days so the cached version will be tossed and yet another copy of Doom will be downloaded.

There are plenty of uses for JacaScript and cool web technologies. There's also lots of places where JavaScript is indispensable and enables awesome things. But requiring 3MB of JavaScript to read a static blog post is just poor craftsmanship. It's not even interesting as a project because you've signed the reader up to execute some unsolicited code to do who knows what. If you love JavaScript, render all your markdown with it on your device and just send me the static output. Don't make me download Doom and the markdown just to turn it into a few paragraphs of text I can't actually read. Web developers should respect their audience enough not to make them spend unnecessary resources to use their stuff.

Re: A whole website in a single JavaScript file

#125

Post by maga »

lhorie wrote: post #99
beeandapenguin wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO the silver lining to Deno is incredibly simple: it’s compatibility with the web platform. I’m not sure what you mean by not compatible with the larger ecosystem, as Deno is basically spec compliant except for the Deno namespace (which you can polyfill out). If you haven’t experienced any pain authoring isomorphic JS with Node, that’s great! My experience has been the opposite of that. But with Deno, everything fe…

To be clear, IMHO, Deno looks fine for what it is. The features are great. The cons ironically mostly boil down to "it's not node", i.e. ejecting a non-trivial app from CRA into some vite setup is doable with some effort, but migrating to Deno is, charitably, likely a monumental task that nobody would ever undertake, even considering the upsides. At the risk of diving too deep into opinion territory, I'm not all that…

Leo, your comments save me a lot of typing on threads like this, and since I recently wrote[1] what beeandapenguin wrote above almost to a point (sans security), I feel obliged to expand a bit.

You are right about incompatibility being a major issue; Deno recognizes that as well, hence, they are working on a compatibility mode that allows using Node specific libraries in Deno[2].

> migrating to Deno is, charitably, likely a monumental task that nobody would ever undertake, even considering the upsides.

This is, of course, contingent on the architecture used: for code tightly coupled to frameworks/runtimes it is indeed a monumental task. I have two small to mid size SaaS apps happily running on Node.js, but I'm looking forward to replacing it with Deno solely for the streamlined DX. The apps follow DDD architecture, thus, framework specific stuff is decoupled into a service/adapter and changing it is a day's work. The major technical road-block for now is indeed incompatibility of third-party libraries/SDKs written for Node.js (google sdk, mongdbo driver, etc.).

[1] https://itnext.io/moving-libraries-to-deno-the-whys-and-hows...

[2] https://github.com/denoland/deno/issues/12577

Re: A whole website in a single JavaScript file

#127

Post by dodyg »

Dangeranger wrote: post #31

Since a bunch of people are setting up a straw-man to criticize this post for "not just serving plain HTML" I'll share my opinions on this. Almost nobody is going to use Deno to serve a basic HTML site with less than a dozen pages, they are going to use it to build a monolith application to get content from a database, or a service, then generate server-rendered pages, and also host an API from the same codebase, or…

ASP.NET Core is pretty minimal in ceremony nowadays. You can easily do single file web development.

https://github.com/dodyg/practical-aspnetcore/blob/net6.0/pr...

Re: A whole website in a single JavaScript file

#128

Post by o_m »

colejohnson66 wrote: post #23
n42 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not a fan of Vercel's strategy, but exactly how is the open source and MIT licensed Next.js a walled garden?

It's not. Next.js works on any platform supporting Node, and Vercel supports more than just Next.js. They support dozens of other frameworks.[0] They do promote Next.js on Vercel, but they don't stop you from using other systems. [0]: https://vercel.com/new/templates

Hosting next.js on Vercel and Azure is like night and day. A lot of smaller things start breaking, like `NEXT_PUBLIC_` environment variables. For me coming from Vercel, using Azure has been an uphill battle.

Re: A whole website in a single JavaScript file

#129

Post by franga2000 »

ramesh31 wrote: post #62
giantrobot wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Almost nobody is going to use Deno to serve a basic HTML site with less than a dozen pages, Assumes facts not in evidence. People are already building JavaScript monstrosities to serve entirely static blog content.

>People are already building JavaScript monstrosities to serve entirely static blog content. I think we just have to accept that that's how websites are built now. It drove me nuts for a while, too. But modern JS engines are blindingly fast, and 2-3mb of JS download (that will be cached aggressively) is a non-issue for the vast majority of users. I started talking to a junior developer the other day about server side…

These sites aren't fast though... As soon as your computer isn't the newest or your internet connection isn't the fastest, or you simply have other things happening in the background, these JS-heavy sites slow down to a crawl where more reasonable things would render instantly. They also make it easier to hide nefarious code and often break accessibility and customizability the user agent is supposed to provide.

Re: A whole website in a single JavaScript file

#130

Post by EnKopVand »

epolanski wrote: post #72
MuffinFlavored wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> monstrosities why do you have to sprinkle that snark + negativity in there? it implies a toxic role of "you are superior" and "people who use JavaScript to serve static blog content" are inferior. why can't we all just get along? especially in this tight-knit programming community that is supposed to be full of love and collaboration. in today's modern day of inclusion and emphasis on mental health, you're spreadin…

While I don't like as well the tone of previous poster, I think that any field should have a healthy dose of "elitism" and "competition" and the previous user is right.

Why do you think the previous poster is right? I personally think they are being sort of silly.

Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely think you should consider your tools, but I recently had to get a screw out of a bookcase. It was stuck in free air and was just going round and round, so I ended up using a hammer to push it in the right direction. This is far from the only time I’ve used my hammer for something it wasn’t intended for, and it got some new scratches on the side, but at the end of the day, the screw got out.

Which is important to remember here on HN, because this isn’t really a “programming community”, it is (or was perhaps) a platform for investors to sneak peak on interesting opportunities masked as social media for hackers. And the ”monstrosity” was launched after all, which is the most important aspect of any product.

Aside from that, I think it’s reasonable to assume that a lot of smaller and personal websites are used as learning experiences. So naturally a lot of them are going to be build “suboptimal” because the reason the tool was chosen was the tool itself.

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