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It’s time to kill the web app

blog.plan99.net

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Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#221

Post by LarryMade2 »

Why web Apps? Because you can hit just about every platform with one codebase, you got instant distribution, you got near universal compatibility. And, If you are inclined, you have minimal licensing.

Desktop has big compatibility cross/platform hurdles (does it run on Linux, MacOS, Windows, Android, iOS, and Playstation?), difficult distribution, and at times licensing (even moreso on walled-garden platforms).

You are also dependent on the desktop/PC manufacturer (ever have Microsoft, Apple, Google, etc pull the rug from under your product? it happens regularly especially with OS updates and "trusted" platform initiatives) Not to mention the development platform whims ("Sorry guys, we are selling to MS. We're sure they'll keep those MacOS and Linux versions up to-date, they are really excited about it!")

Maybe if its a open platform with high adoption on the scale of LibreOffice or GIMP... maybe.

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#222

Post by sorenjan »

bjelkeman-again wrote: post #120
addicted wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 where webapps being built before gmail. We did Ajax-like things in 1999-2000. But gmail was possibly the first slick implementation.

I remember how impressed I was when Google Maps was released. Instead of having to click on arrows to reload the page with a new map, you could just drag and it would automatically load new map tiles!

Google Earth (the native application) is really old and abandoned by now, but its still better than the new "web" version that only works in Chrome.

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#223

Post by alkonaut »

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…

I just find the way DOM/CSS does layout and styling to be completely convoluted and crazy compared to any desktop toolkit since 1990. Center anything either vertically or horizontally - that cannot require me to google and most importantly cannot have multiple different solutions. Simple things should not just have simple solutions, they should have one simple solution.

Memory-unsafe programs on the desktop should go the same way as the HTML layout model.

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#224

Post by andrewflnr »

I agree that the web is kind of a catastrophe. However, the problem is not really that it confused documents and apps. I would actually like to see this distinction get blurrier, in the form of better support for active documents, ranging from interactive illustrations of ideas to spreadsheets with formulas.

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#225

Post by marmart »

alkonaut wrote: post #223
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…

I just find the way DOM/CSS does layout and styling to be completely convoluted and crazy compared to any desktop toolkit since 1990. Center anything either vertically or horizontally - that cannot require me to google and most importantly cannot have multiple different solutions . Simple things should not just have simple solutions, they should have one simple solution. Memory-unsafe programs on the desktop should g…

Gridbox and Flexbox largely make layouts sane again.

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#226

Post by mwcampbell »

nostrademons wrote: post #188
jacquesm wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they'll lose out to systems that promise security (and usually address a few specific attacks on the previous incumbent This happens in other areas besides applications as well. Programming languages, operating systems. This leads to an eternal re-invention of the wheel in different forms without ever really moving on.

Yep. Databases, web frameworks, GUI frameworks, editors, concurrency models, social networks, photo-sharing sites, and consumer reviews as well. Outside of computers, it applies to traffic, airlines, politics, publicly-traded companies, education & testing, and any industry related to "coolness" (fashion, entertainment, and all the niche fads that hipsters love). I refer to these as "unstable industries" - they all e…

How do we fix this?

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#227

Post by goatlover »

kowdermeister wrote: post #203
goatlover wrote: post #168

Earlier 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.

Try VSCode it's one of the best IDE, it has code completion, built in documentation and even code autocomplete for JavaScript. https://imgur.com/a/26oFa

It's an IDE for a programming language, which is only part of the picture. Compare it to what the Flash IDE or Visual Basic offered developers. Or Smalltalk in terms of a fully customizable, live environment.

Maybe something that's a cross between Developer Tools, Flash Designer and the Smalltalk environment.

Anyway, VS Code isn't the development environment for the web. It's just one of many options for writing Javascript.

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#228

Post by mrcabada »

Long live web apps. It’s not that they need to be killed, it’s that they are evolving and need/urge to evolve more. With so many OS, HTML works perfectly to distribute one single source-code in all platforms. I see it the other way around, “web apps” are here to stay and evolve.

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#229

Post by nradov »

valuearb wrote: post #193
disordinary wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You don't have to imagine. MS Office is available as a web app.

https://www.office.com/

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#230

Post by hutzlibu »

hyperpape wrote: post #55

I don't get the section on JSON, which seems to assert that XML is more secure than JSON. It does this by linking to a Wikipedia page that includes the security consideration that you shouldn't call eval on JSON. True, but at least that's a tractable problem. Your linter can check for code that calls eval. In contrast, there are plenty of XML attacks (DOS with billions of laughs, entity references), and parsing XML i…

"If you want to rag on JSON, that's fine. It's not a great format"

JSON is simple and powerfull. It's success justifies it, to call it a great format, I think. But I am curious, what whould be a great format, in your opinion?

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