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The Future of Web Apps - Single Page Applications

happyworm.com

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Re: The Future of Web Apps - Single Page Applications

#31

Post by _urga »

I have been working through these ideas since 2007, taking it one step at a time:

2007: I "single-paged" subsections of my application, with different PHP scripts on the backend.

2008: Consolidated the backend into a single API.

2009: Switched the backend to Rails for ORM functionality, and finished upgrading the client interface to a single page application.

2009: Switched the backend to Javascript (Rhino) to enable sharing of model validations and other code (even native object extensions) with the client.

2009: Got my application working completely offline using a local SQL database and replication manager, together with ApplicationCache. At first I used LocalStorage but soon hit storage and performance limits.

2009: Switched from Rhino to NodeJS. Much faster, cleaner APIs. Huge performance gains from V8 and non-blocking IO.

2010: Results of the above up at: https://szpil.com

Along the way I built up a framework for managing concatenation, client-side navigation, sessions, views, controllers, email etc. One significant advantage of building client-side only apps that replicate with the server is that they work offline by definition. Managing state on the client opens up incredible opportunities.

Re: The Future of Web Apps - Single Page Applications

#32

Post by prodigal_erik »

asnyder wrote: post #29
prodigal_erik wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't appear that they simply reinvented what you did. Their approach works well without js, meanwhile NOLOH and the four "powered by" sites are mazes of mostly dead links and missing alt text (one site has nothing more than a blurb blaming the visitor for the author's neglect, which I wouldn't showcase).

It's clear you didn't actually click on the sites in the powered by, but rather went completely on ShrinkTheWeb's out of date thumbnails. There is not a single dead link, and the image with the text is a reference to a server error, but clicking on the site goes to the live site. There are 3 pages, with 9 live sites. There are many more, but not everybody decides to post their sites to the powered by section. We'll b…

I don't mean thumbnails. http://www.noloh.com/?poweredby/ shows me four sites and no way to navigate to more. If I follow the link to the last, http://www.diffpaste.com/, I see "Paste", "Diff", and "Latest Pastes" across the top and categories ranging from "PHP (67)" to "C++ (1)" down the right, none of which do anything at all. Likewise, http://www.noloh.com/ has several highlighted phrases and "Read More" divs which look like they were supposed to be links but don't go anywhere. Many other links all lead to http://dev.noloh.com/ rather than whichever page was intended, because the server can't see the path after the # sign. If you thought this stuff all worked without js, I'm sorry but I assure you much of it does not, so the happyworm.com crew seem to be onto something good.

Re: The Future of Web Apps - Single Page Applications

#33

Post by jdee »

A conversation about single page apps would not be complete without mentioning Sammy.JS http://code.quirkey.com/sammy/

It's a fantastic little library that gives you the ability to add what I can only describe as 'rails-style' routes to your client side .js apps. It makes your single page apps much easier to write and has a good event-handling model too.

Re: The Future of Web Apps - Single Page Applications

#34

Post by asnyder »

prodigal_erik wrote: post #32
asnyder wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's clear you didn't actually click on the sites in the powered by, but rather went completely on ShrinkTheWeb's out of date thumbnails. There is not a single dead link, and the image with the text is a reference to a server error, but clicking on the site goes to the live site. There are 3 pages, with 9 live sites. There are many more, but not everybody decides to post their sites to the powered by section. We'll b…

I don't mean thumbnails. http://www.noloh.com/?poweredby/ shows me four sites and no way to navigate to more. If I follow the link to the last, http://www.diffpaste.com/ , I see "Paste", "Diff", and "Latest Pastes" across the top and categories ranging from "PHP (67)" to "C++ (1)" down the right, none of which do anything at all. Likewise, http://www.noloh.com/ has several highlighted phrases and "Read More" divs whi…

You're basing your assumptions on a broken premise. You're clearly not browsing normally, but rather are crippling your browser in some way, after which you decide to bash whatever you can, without clearly identifying your methods.

As I mentioned earlier it's at the developer's discretion as to whether they want to enable JS degradation or not. Sometimes when an application is sufficiently complex a developer may choose not to, or not have certain actions map to links.

You shouldn't base your assumptions on one implementation, but rather, read what the technology claims to do and then try it so you can actually see, rather than just slash and burn.

It's people like you that really make me wonder whether we should even continue down the standards based route, or continue to support text-based browsers, as mentioned in our latest blog posts http://dev.noloh.com/#/blog/, or http://dev.noloh.com/?/blog/ for you. Not a single client or user has ever asked for such features, but we always get complaints from the die-hards. So we work and implement it, to what effect? Next you'll complain that some app that uses NOLOH doesn't do XYZ. There's nothing we can do about that, we can't force users to upgrade, or implement a feature, we can only offer it.

Clearly it doesn't matter what we do, or how compatible we try to be, you won't care, won't listen, and won't actually try it.

Re: The Future of Web Apps - Single Page Applications

#36

Post by prodigal_erik »

asnyder wrote: post #34
prodigal_erik wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't mean thumbnails. http://www.noloh.com/?poweredby/ shows me four sites and no way to navigate to more. If I follow the link to the last, http://www.diffpaste.com/ , I see "Paste", "Diff", and "Latest Pastes" across the top and categories ranging from "PHP (67)" to "C++ (1)" down the right, none of which do anything at all. Likewise, http://www.noloh.com/ has several highlighted phrases and "Read More" divs whi…

You're basing your assumptions on a broken premise. You're clearly not browsing normally, but rather are crippling your browser in some way, after which you decide to bash whatever you can, without clearly identifying your methods. As I mentioned earlier it's at the developer's discretion as to whether they want to enable JS degradation or not. Sometimes when an application is sufficiently complex a developer may cho…

Firefox 3.6.8 on Vista Home Premium x64 without js on. That's all.

If I were in the market for a web framework, I would not take it on faith that I could rely upon interoperability features the site claims but does not demonstrate. And I wouldn't write the demo myself unless I had already ruled out your competitors.

If you decide to drop it, I have no doubt you can still find a large potential market of developers either indifferent or ignorant about the ongoing disintegration of the open HTML web. It comes down to what kind of effect you're comfortable with having on the industry.

Re: The Future of Web Apps - Single Page Applications

#37

Post by csomar »

asnyder wrote: post #26
jmtulloss wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I clicked on the link, I almost clicked off before seeing what language this was even targeted at. The first point is "Develop in a single, object-oriented language." That's just buzz. Line 2: "Stop worrying about HTML, JavaScript, AJAX, and Comet." More buzz. Everybody says I can stop worrying about these things, but I still don't believe you. Is it web based? Line 3: "Deploy seamlessly across all browsers and…

Thanks for the feedback. We do have that huge header that says "Build for the Web Faster & Easier!", thus we would hope you immediately conclude it's web based. For most of those points above, the keywords are actually links to more information for each of those points. Line 3 in particular is meant to emphasize that you can deploy across all browsers and operating systems, this is in fact not what every web page doe…

Please read http://www.alistapart.com/articles/writingcontentthatworksfo... and may be you'll change your opinion about how web copies should be.

Re: The Future of Web Apps - Single Page Applications

#38

Post by simonw »

kls wrote: post #16
antichaos wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you read the article? The single-page web app degrades to linked pages when JavaScript is disabled, and it's fully indexable by search engines.

It's actually simpler than that now days, you simple set up a server with a headless web browser on it and route all old-browser and crawlers to that box. They get the same functionality but with-in a page post model. There are a few architectural adherence but for the most part it works pretty well.

That's simple? Do you know of any sites that actually do that?

Re: The Future of Web Apps - Single Page Applications

#39

Post by mattmanser »

kls wrote: post #20
adriand wrote: post #11

I think this makes sense in a couple of situations. First, for stuff that is fairly simple and where not having page loads is highly desirable, such as a music playing app like his example. Second, for stuff that is complex but you have a team of engineers and computer scientists as well as a suite of tools that make dealing with that complexity much more manageable, as in Gmail. In most other situations though, wher…

It is really not more complex and done right it is significantly simpler. If you roll your own toolkit it is a pain, but if you utilize a framework like Dojo, it is far easier than Java(JSP, Struts, JSF, et al.) or ASP.NET or even PHP. Without the contortions of pumping everything to the server and then getting a response and trying to figure out that context, you get a far less fragmented memory model. For example l…

The techniques you're describing aren't benefits of your system. They're just modern web programming techniques and certainly don't need to be used in a single page programming model.

For example the majority of what you're describing as benefits has been known to anyone using MVC for a while, MVC is available in any of the languages you mentioned as your system being easier than.

Re: The Future of Web Apps - Single Page Applications

#40

Post by maushu »

kls wrote: post #16
antichaos wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you read the article? The single-page web app degrades to linked pages when JavaScript is disabled, and it's fully indexable by search engines.

It's actually simpler than that now days, you simple set up a server with a headless web browser on it and route all old-browser and crawlers to that box. They get the same functionality but with-in a page post model. There are a few architectural adherence but for the most part it works pretty well.

I always wondered about this, how does Google prevent this type of behavior? Like serving specific content to search engines and show other content to users... do they check using camouflaged bots?
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