21–30 of 58 posts
He's got years of accumulated wisdom that make his comments about programming natively vs. in the browser worth some careful thought. As you read his post, remember he developed a functional, useful, modern spreadsheet package on 1979 hardware.
The CTO of a company which makes a web platform for mobile development ( http://www.alphasoftware.com/products.asp ), thinks mobile web apps are good enough? What a surprise...
Not really. You get to work with a buggy language and you loose competitive edge on the work market. Management's/business's point of view could be different though.
> For most of what we are talking about, JavaScript does not execute in a vacuum. It runs in a browser. That browser environment brings a lot to the table. The applications you are coding are often ones that lend themselves to what a browser is good for: Presenting information. We already covered this too. Apps that are just about "presenting information" (your typical CRUD stuff, or glorified CRUD, from Gmail to twi…
The problem again is not really javascript, it is DOM manipulation. You can have the fastest javascript engine ever,if the bottelneck is the DOM , there is little you can do about it. And everybody doesnt own a quad-core mobile. I like Titanium approach where the ui is native and the code is javascript,so you are basically using javascript with a specific API,not the DOM. I'd like to see more frameworks like this , o…
The problem again is not really javascript, it is DOM manipulation. You can have the fastest javascript engine ever,if the bottelneck is the DOM , there is little you can do about it. And everybody doesnt own a quad-core mobile. I like Titanium approach where the ui is native and the code is javascript,so you are basically using javascript with a specific API,not the DOM. I'd like to see more frameworks like this , o…
I guess I am failing to see where the argument lies? Isn't this still the first rule of Programming Club?
Nothing specific to Java though, the .NET guys have spent about 15 years optimizing their GC. Yet every UI framework on that platform seems like a turd compared to Visual Basic (WinForms, WPF, Silverlight). Looks like they are throwing the towel and asking everyone to move to HTML and javascript. I wish javascript guys spent more time benchmarking UI performance than making it look like C++ (asm.js and other things). Take a paper draw circle on it. Push it on a smooth desk. That's your use case and how things should perform. No jitter, no flashes. Don't care about some fancy assembler optimization for matrix multiplications.
Of course that is only one part of the problem with javascript. The other big problem is lack of tools for putting UI's and writing large programs. On top of that you have to add in all the libraries (jQuery, Angular etc.) now you are totally hosed. You don't know where your performance issues are. In any case, mobile apps today have really two platforms - iOS and Android. They have quite different use cases (paid vs advertising). Most UIs are thin wrappers on services. Porting to the next platform is not some huge rewrite.
Even when native apps are slow, they can have a feeling of cohesiveness and polish that web apps lack.