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On Modern Web Applications Stability

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Re: On Modern Web Applications Stability

#21

Post by codyb »

lexicality wrote: post #18

Occasionally while waiting for npm install to finish downloading, I think about how there are websites like http://www.urbandead.com/ which is probably a single 20k line perl script and mysql server running on a single box with 12 years of uptime that somehow manage to get along just fine with no javascript and apparently no input from their owners. When I started doing webdev 8 years ago you shipped a recentish copy…

It's pretty crazy. I have just about the exact same experience I'd say. On personal projects I'm moving back towards straight CSS, Vanilla JS (maybe I'll use jQuery if they get more complicated, they're very bare bones at the moment), and server generated HTML with Django templates.

Web Development seems to move at this incredible pace. I also started just about 8 years ago and I've gone through jQuery, Angular 1, Backbone, React, React with Classes, React with Hooks.

And even the tiniest project I do with NPM ends up being hundreds of megs on disk locally. I was cleaning my harddrive recently, MomentJS is _over 100mbs_ cloned from GitHub, I don't even know if I actually did an NPM install in there.

Material UI was _nearly a gig_. I'm assuming there are assets in there somewhere.

Meanwhile we have really neat improvements in CSS and HTML that I want to go and use but I'm to busy learning how to do CSS in my JavaScript, and validation in my JavaScript. Reinventing accessibility by deploying ever more bloated projects filled with bugs and inconsistencies.

I wonder if we'll see a gradual return to less complicated stacks as people realize a lot of work can be accomplished pretty reasonably with a lot less and a greater reliance on the browsers to do a fair amount of water carrying.

I'm not sure... but I have to get back to learning how to create APIs in GraphQL ;-).

Re: On Modern Web Applications Stability

#22

Post by ecmascript »

I completely disagree. Stability isn't better when you do everything yourself, actually in my experience, it's worse.

For example, if I want my users to be able to scan a generated qr code, I am not going to write a qr code generator myself since that is quite a lot of work. I will use a trusted library to do that for me.

In this way, the library will have had a lot of eyes, patches all the time fixing bugs and so on. If I would try and make a QR code generator, I would most likely make a lot of mistakes and bugs that more seasoned people that have experience in making such functionality already have experienced and fixed.

If I stopped writing code for the company I work for today, the application would work just the same in one year, in two years etc. I don't get why a desktop app would be more stable than a web app in that sense. I would argue a web app is more stable since we don't really break backward-compatibility in a browser in the same way people do in desktop operating systems.

Sure there is something to be said to not use a big ass framework for some small app. I think frameworks usually brings more pain than it's worth in the long run. But having dependencies in modern applications is a must, even in desktop applications because people expect and demands it. If you would not use dependencies, your customers would choose your competitors most likely.

Re: On Modern Web Applications Stability

#24

Post by zokier »

pieno wrote: post #9

Reminds me of this movie illustration the complexity and human collaboration required to produce a pencil: https://youtu.be/IYO3tOqDISE (6:33 in total; it’s a bit “dreamy” sometimes but still worth a watch, you can skip the first minute). Basically entire human civilization is based on collaboration, learning from and relying on each other (among other things). The process kickstarted with developments in agriculture…

Sure, supply chains exist everywhere (and managing them is a field of its own..), but usually they are more explicit at least on each "link" of the chain. Can you imagine producing pencil in full anarchy where people just do random stuff and somehow you have to fish out the things you need and hope they keep the flows going without any explicit agreements or contracts? Where you get wood from logger because he happens to like logging that much, or he had some leftovers after doing a gig for someone else? That imaginary world resembles more the current state of software.

Re: On Modern Web Applications Stability

#27

Post by ratww »

codyb wrote: post #21
lexicality wrote: post #18

Occasionally while waiting for npm install to finish downloading, I think about how there are websites like http://www.urbandead.com/ which is probably a single 20k line perl script and mysql server running on a single box with 12 years of uptime that somehow manage to get along just fine with no javascript and apparently no input from their owners. When I started doing webdev 8 years ago you shipped a recentish copy…

It's pretty crazy. I have just about the exact same experience I'd say. On personal projects I'm moving back towards straight CSS, Vanilla JS (maybe I'll use jQuery if they get more complicated, they're very bare bones at the moment), and server generated HTML with Django templates. Web Development seems to move at this incredible pace. I also started just about 8 years ago and I've gone through jQuery, Angular 1, Ba…

There's nothing wrong with Vanilla JS and jQuery, but if you need more interactivity, it's possible to use modern libraries like React (with htm [1]) or Vue without a compilation step, all with zero dependencies. The size of the libraries is only 10k to 20k bigger than jQuery.

If you need even less bytes, then Preact is also an option (also with htm [1]), and it clocks at around 3k + 400 bytes for htm.

If you're only targeting modern browsers with ES6 support you can even use `import from` statements.

[1] https://github.com/developit/htm

Re: On Modern Web Applications Stability

#29

Post by pkphilip »

codyb wrote: post #21
lexicality wrote: post #18

Occasionally while waiting for npm install to finish downloading, I think about how there are websites like http://www.urbandead.com/ which is probably a single 20k line perl script and mysql server running on a single box with 12 years of uptime that somehow manage to get along just fine with no javascript and apparently no input from their owners. When I started doing webdev 8 years ago you shipped a recentish copy…

It's pretty crazy. I have just about the exact same experience I'd say. On personal projects I'm moving back towards straight CSS, Vanilla JS (maybe I'll use jQuery if they get more complicated, they're very bare bones at the moment), and server generated HTML with Django templates. Web Development seems to move at this incredible pace. I also started just about 8 years ago and I've gone through jQuery, Angular 1, Ba…

Just to give this some perspective, the entire Wordperfect 5.2 download is less than 4MB!

https://winworldpc.com/product/wordperfect/5x-dos

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24413394

Web development has become so cludgy especially with the SPAs which do not even support bookmarking.

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