It’s time to kill the web app • Hacker News Board

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#191

Post by sunseb » Sat, Sep 23, 2017, 10:25 PM UTC

Yeah, I have been working on the web for 10 years. When I started, it was fun, because I knew nothing, and that seemed magical to me, but the more I work on this platform, the more I realize it's crap.

We are now at peak crap. Did you see all this JavaScript bullshit code needed nowadays to just render a fucking web page and fetch some data?

I hope OOP would die too, I mean, it's often an over-engineered bloat that only works for trivial Programming 101 courses (using Bike, Vehicle classes). In real world, I found OOP to make things messy with pseudo-objects like Service, Manager, (Abstract?!)Factory and so. Just using params and functions feels more natural I think.

Sorry for the rant. I think we all do an unbelievable job pushing these tools to their limits, but it's just made me sad that we may building on ugly foundations.

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#192

Post by valuearb » Sat, Sep 23, 2017, 10:26 PM UTC

I deleted Facebook from my iphone because i don’t want to give them that much access, and now only use their web app on my iphone. And it’s horrible. If Facebook can’t get it right, who can?

My latest example is from 30 minutes ago, where I tried uploading s video; and almost gave up after 5 mins. The UI was hard to understand, extremely slow and never let me understand what was happening.

Professionally I’m an iOS lead on a dual platform (iOS @ Android) app that has hundreds of thousands of users. I’ve occasionally wondered about whether we should switch to React Bative and using Web Facebook always cures me of that idea.

And the fact that i’ve spent hundreds of hours optimizing our app and every view to ensure they launch and open as quickly as possible, down to managing every bit of memory use as ruthlessly as possible. And letting our users use our app offline. Every second costs us users and dollars.

Then there are new technologies like ARKit. Native is still the best way to go if you can afford the time and people to do it the best way possible.

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#193

Post by valuearb » Sat, Sep 23, 2017, 10:28 PM UTC

disordinary wrote: post #21

SwellJoe wrote: post #12

I find this unconvincing. Every negative thing said about the web is true of every other platform, so far. It just seems to ignore how bad software has always been (on average). "Web development is slowly reinventing the 1990's." The 90s were slowly reinventing UNIX and stuff invented at Bell Labs. "Web apps are impossible to secure." Programs in the 90s were written in C and C++. C is impossible to secure. C++ is im…

Yep, also on speed: it seems to me that the microsoft office suite for instance slows down every generation despite only having minor improvements and not actually being that different now than from 95. The nature of developers is that they will use whatever resources that they have. Faster computers don't necessarily mean faster applications but faster software development cycles from bigger teams with less need for…

Just imagine how slow MS Office could be as a web app.

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#194

Post by mbreese » Sat, Sep 23, 2017, 10:28 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #162

aidenn0 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Web development is slowly reinventing the 1990's." > The 90s were slowly reinventing UNIX and stuff invented at Bell Labs. Yes, this reminds me of: "Wasn't all this done years ago at Xerox PARC? (No one remembers what was really done at PARC, but everyone else will assume you remember something they don't.)" [1] > "Buffers that don’t specify their length" > Is this really a common problem in web apps? Most web app…

> if html used length-prefixed tags rather than open/close tags most injection attacks would go away immediately. That's not really the problem. The problem is there is no distinction between data and control leading to everything coming to you in one binary stream. If the control aspect would be out-of-band then the problem would really go away. Length prefixes will just turn into one more thing to overwrite or inte…

I'm having a hard time seeing how having separate control and data streams would have an effect here. Using FTP to retrieve a document isn't more secure than HTTP... the problem is in how the document itself is parsed. If you added a separate side channel for requesting data (a la FTP), you'd still have the issue of parsing the HTML on the other side.

Granted, if you made that control channel stateful, you'd make a lot of problems go away. But you could do that with a combined control/data stream too.

What am I missing? How would an out-of-band control channel make things easier?

That said, I think many issues with the web could be solved by implementing new protocols as opposed to shoehorning everything into HTTP just to avoid a firewall...

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#195

Post by bastawhiz » Sat, Sep 23, 2017, 10:28 PM UTC

quadrangle wrote: post #139

bastawhiz wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if html used length-prefixed tags rather than open/close tags most injection attacks would go away immediately. If this was the case, it would be near-impossible to write HTML by hand. And if you're writing HTML with a tool (React, HAML etc.), the tool could be doing HTML escaping correctly instead. This isn't an issue with HTML, it's an issue with human error.

If you have an issue with human error and don't design your programmed tool to avoid letting the errors out into the world, then it is the fault of the tool.

I'm not sure what the argument you're putting forth is. All of the HTML-generating tools I'm aware of (barring dumb string templating tools) work sufficiently well and prevent human error.

My point is that there's nothing wrong with HTML. HTML isn't a tool, it's a format for storing and transmitting hypertext. If you're using React or HAML or any of the other HTML-generating tools, you're effectively immune from XSS. I'm putting forth that developers aren't using effective tools (shame on every templating engine that doesn't escape by default), and that calling the web as a platform bad is a bit nonsensical. It's like saying "folks are writing asm by hand and their code has security issues, therefore x86_64 is insecure".

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#196

Post by camgunz » Sat, Sep 23, 2017, 10:28 PM UTC

addicted wrote: post #105

jerf wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Any time I think I'd like to do something with the web and sit down to learn, it's completely overwhelming. I've never been able to put together a coherent mental model of the architecture of a web application or figure out what the best practices are for web development." If it makes you feel any better, that's because there isn't a coherent mental model. If you've ever heard of the ORM/Relational impedance mismatc…

A lot of the churn is because the web is so young as an application platform. It’s been less than 20years since GMail which was probably the first thing that even approximated an application on the web. Chrome was released in 2008 less than 10years ago, and it was the first time the web had a runtime engine which was perform at enough to even build an app.

20 years is forever. Nothing should be this bad after 20 years.

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#197

Post by smitherfield » Sat, Sep 23, 2017, 10:30 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #47

avaer wrote: post #19

I sympathize with the sentiment, but the web app only sucks if you're using the stuff that sucks. Like any technology with decades of evolution it has a thick sediment of peat. Half of Javascript, half of Windows, even half of *nix is garbage you should never use, but it's all there because old things would stop working without it. It's just that the web has a very low barrier to entry and very high reach, so the com…

The web is way worse and less coherent than something like Cocoa, even though Cocoa is older. That’s because the former was designed for text documents.

Slight bit of pedantry: only the AppKit (1989) component of Cocoa predates the web (1990) while Foundation and Core Data (both 1994) came later. Of course, many nowadays-integral features of the web also came after its initial release, such as CGI and the and tags (all 1993), cookies and HTTPS (both 1994), Javascript (1995), HTTP headers, methods other than GET, non-ASCII text encodings and CSS (all 1996), AJAX (1999), and the tag (2007).

Anyhow, I'm in full agreement. The web honestly isn't even that good a design for [hyper]text documents; HyperCard (as one example among many) was a great deal better, and better for graphical and multimedia content, and for applications too. Of course HyperCard wasn't cross-platform or served over a network, but it easily could've been adapted to be.

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#198

Post by artursapek » Sat, Sep 23, 2017, 10:30 PM UTC

goatlover wrote: post #168

SquareWheel wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No kidding. I'm at the point of almost exclusively developing webapps. Universal, instant, and powerful. It's the perfect platform.

It's really not. HTML and CSS are far from ideal for making applications. JS has gotten better, but it still lacking in some ways. And there is no IDE for the web, whereas Smalltalk had one in the 70s, and numerous ones have existed for other platforms since then.

You have to wonder why it is, then, that the web has gotten so big and all of those other "platforms" are marked with tombstones.

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#199

Post by Entangled » Sat, Sep 23, 2017, 10:32 PM UTC

How about using an app:// protocol for compiled apps with security in mind, meaning sandboxed and no filesystem access? Http is for hyper TEXT, not hyper BYTES.

Wasm is a great opportunity to reinvent web apps. Please don't fuck it up.

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#200

Post by narrator » Sat, Sep 23, 2017, 10:32 PM UTC

addicted wrote: post #105

jerf wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Any time I think I'd like to do something with the web and sit down to learn, it's completely overwhelming. I've never been able to put together a coherent mental model of the architecture of a web application or figure out what the best practices are for web development." If it makes you feel any better, that's because there isn't a coherent mental model. If you've ever heard of the ORM/Relational impedance mismatc…

A lot of the churn is because the web is so young as an application platform. It’s been less than 20years since GMail which was probably the first thing that even approximated an application on the web. Chrome was released in 2008 less than 10years ago, and it was the first time the web had a runtime engine which was perform at enough to even build an app.

Everybody here is too young to remember the era of the Microsoft monopoly and how much it sucked. The Web app era is much nicer. Besides Web Apps aren't bad compared to the 90s win32 api which was closed source and riddled with bugs and undocumented behavior.