Just make better webapps... There are too many second rate "developers" making shitty apps...
It’s time to kill the web app
201–210 of 717 posts
Re: It’s time to kill the web app
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Obviously for other reasons, like the fact that everyone has a browser for free on their device, and everyone knows how to use Google. There are very strong network effects in favor of the web.
It is a great platform in some ways. But it's not ideal for creating applications.
Re: It’s time to kill the web app
#203Earlier 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.
Try VSCode it's one of the best IDE, it has code completion, built in documentation and even code autocomplete for JavaScript.
Re: It’s time to kill the web app
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Most injection attacks are due to this; if html used length-prefixed tags rather than open/close tags most injection attacks would go away immediately No it wouldn't. It wouldn't fix sql injection and it also wouldn't fix the path bug the op linked. The problem is not length, it is context unaware strings. The problem is our obsession with primitive types that pervade our codebases.
SQL injection is not a web problem. If you create SQL queries based on any untrusted (e.g. user) input on any platform, you have to escape/explicitly type your input. Injection in general is simply a trust problem. If you can trust all inputs fully (hint: you can't, because nobody can), then you will never have an injection attack.
SQL injection is a problem with SQL, which is similar to problems with HTML. SQL was created as human-friendly query languages, it wasn't created to be built from strings in a programming language. Proper database API should be just a bunch of query builder calls and with this API SQL-injection is not possible.
Re: It’s time to kill the web app
#205It's probably not realistic, but I would love to see the web be completely thrown out and replaced with something reasonable. I write a decent amount of native code. I write Rust, C, and x64 assembly. I think I'm pretty good at this stuff. But the web is too much for me. 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 c…
I don't really understand. You say that the web needs to be completely thrown out, yet you decided that your foray into web development should be to build a thick Javascript web application? Not some simple Flask endpoint? Because I assume you could figure out a basic request/response server, and your issue is that you dove into something like Webpack + React + Flux + Qux + Fux + Foo.
> Not some simple Flask endpoint?
I don't even know what a "Flask endpoint" is. Actually I barely know what Webpack and React are either.
Re: It’s time to kill the web app
#206The author seems to think that most developers think the Web sucks and needs to be killed. While this may have a sliver of truth behind it —in that a lot of us are dissatisfied with certain aspects of the platform— there's one thing the author fails to address:
If the Web (and Javascript) suck so badly, then what's up with all those Electron desktop apps? And all those react native/nativescript/ionic mobile apps?
IMHO, the author fails to address the only reason the web is popular as an application platform: its still the only reliable way to make sure your code runs everywhere with as little effort as possible.
Re: It’s time to kill the web app
#207I 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…
C is not impossible to secure, actually. There are popular C programs which are more robust than your average high-level dynamic language program. It takes a deep commitment (hence a lack of good examples), but there is generally a clear path to a well-behaved program in C, and there's nothing about C itself which prevents you from writing secure code. On the web, you must actively mitigate pitfalls of the platform itself, in C you just have to make sure your program is itself well behaved.
You might argue either way, but a straightforward C program can be correct if it is well formulated, but a straightforward web app can not be correct unless it is fully mitigated.
Re: It’s time to kill the web app
#208Earlier 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.
There were plenty of webapps before Gmail. There was even plenty of other webmail services before Gmail and Gmail wasn't much different from the status quo. I've been using webmail since 1997 and even my University had a web interface (SquirrelMail) for those who preferred using the web interface (almost everyone). This was pre Gmail.
Re: It’s time to kill the web app
#209> Hence my conclusion: if you can’t hire web devs that understand how to write secure web apps then writing secure web apps is impossible.
Furthermore, the web devs that understand how hard it is to write secure web apps generally don't want to do it for a living.
I've found that the most straightforward way of avoiding problems on the web is to sidestep them as much as possible. Draw UI with canvas or WebGL, overlay native widgets, use RPC over a WebSocket for everything except for public assets.
Re: It’s time to kill the web app
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
My alarm siren went off when the commentary started critiquing the “complexity” of Google docs as compared to Windows explorer circa 1998. Complex things are often complex because the work that we do as humans is, well, complicated. A journey map painstakingly built by an epic designer and smart person at large may design the ultimate document template that addresses every need that you are aware of. Then I come alon…
Your alarm shouldn't go off, because the example is very much apt. The article compared the UI offered by both, and they are indeed directly comparable. As for the work Google Docs do, come on, they're a glorified Markdown editor, they lose in any kind of comparison with Windows 95-era Word.
Windows 95-era Word didn’t have to handle real-time collaboration over the Web between an arbitrary number of users.