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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

#451

Post by [deleted] »

kowdermeister wrote: post #294
hutzlibu wrote: post #270

I rather think, It's time, to completley ignore sensationalistic rant's like this one. First of, killing a technology does not solve anything. It just means less options. So do propose your better solution (and build it) - then we can talk about killing the current thing. But the way it is today, the web works. Definitely not flawless and in large parts really ugly (just browsing with open dev-tools is horrifying, wh…

What's odd is that this article is so well written that it really clicks with bitter developers who are just confused in the vast sea of alternative technologies with the web. At least that's my guess why there's so many upvotes here. I feel that anyone who rants like this comes from a low level micromanagement world where they have extreme control over everything any they can't have it with web technologies. Fine, b…

[deleted]

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#453

Post by rakibtg »

First of all, there is nothing called web app, this are called websites, that makes sense that the author is more likely to like app's for everything.

Yet web has no alternatives for what it supposed to do, so lets not try to fix it, as it is not broken. and possibilities of web technologies are limitless.

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#454

Post by ibdknox »

jkmcf wrote: post #397
api wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MS really had rapid GUI development absolutely nailed in the late 90s. For some reason we forgot all that.

MS had nothing on Sun’s Dev Guide, the easiest and best GUI dev tool i’ve ever seen. I say this because it took me zero effort to use due to how intuitive it was to get started...

do you have any pointers for learning about it? Looking up "Sun Dev Guide" didn't seem to find me anything related to GUI editors.

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#455

Post by philwelch »

We definitely don’t have a replacement for the web on the presentation layer. Likewise, we’re stuck with web services for now for the display services sitting immediately behind the frontend. But for pure backend services, there are plenty of alternatives to HTTP that are ready to use today and more sane. There just isn’t a ratified “standard” yet (outside of large tech companies, which tend to have their own).

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#457

Post by tluyben2 »

pcwalton wrote: post #419
catnaroek wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it has basically zero understanding of flexible layouts. That's largely a non-issue to me. If I need anything fancy, I'll draw it myself. The simple stuff ought to be simple. > As a result, things break as soon as you try to make an easily resizable window Au contraire! It is much easier to make a resizable window when you are in full control of how nested widgets are resized along with it. That being said, some au…

CSS is incredibly simple if all you care about is absolute positioning. It's just that nobody wants to make a Win32 style app with absolute positioning on the Web. That's because responsive apps are superior to nonresizable, manually positioned UIs.

Are they? Most 'web apps' I use have a preferable browser size; if you use them at a smaller size they still work (they are responsive) but are just unusable for anything sane. So superior... I made those layouts with Delphi too early 90s and the same consistent behavior was true then as it is now; 99% (to not get 'source?' questions; I have been writing consumer software for almost 30 years and in my experience + the experience of peers I talk to) of consumer users of software click on maximize the first instance they open anything; browser or non browser. So sure, I use tiling window managers and like different windows, but most people don't, hence the success of tablets; they are simple because 1 app, maximized at a time. And those apps sure are responsive but they don't need to be; they look the same on all tablets for the resolution they were designed to be used at. Just simply scaling them would've worked fine for most people and usecases. You would have to write things twice; one for small screens (phones) and one for big screens (desktops) but that's not really that uncommon now either.

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#458

Post by emodendroket »

hutzlibu wrote: post #230
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?

I really wish it had a format for dates.

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#459

Post by halfteatree »

jeffdavis wrote: post #245
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…

"Most web apps are built in languages that don't have buffer overrun problems." You misunderstood the author's point. Things like SQL injection are really equivalent to buffer overflow attacks -- data creeping into the code because of poor bounds checking.

But SQL injection isn't a thing unique to the web right? Like, SQL injection is totally a thing with c/c++ as well. Maybe focus on one problem at a time.

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#460

Post by gregmac »

x0x0 wrote: post #233
alkonaut wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I used vb6 20 years ago and have recently (quite unfortunately) had to learn html/js/css basics. The web is hot garbage for displaying form data compared to microsoft tools circa 1996.

The big problem is they are trying to solve different problems.

Microsoft stuff was going for fixed screen size/resolution, fixed layout, and using a quite limited set of controls.

Web browsers try to be accommodating by default - any screen size (including mobile), zoom built in, and significantly more powerful control primitives that allow enormous flexibility in the way to design things.

If you're building forms applications that only need to work on a PC, the old way was certainly easier, and in fact, Microsoft has WebForms (regular ASP.NET - not MVC or API) that is pretty similar (and doesn't horribly break down so long as you color within the lines, so to speak).

Try to imagine your vb6 app being able to scale down to window the size of a phone screen, and how the WYSIWYG editor for that works even work - I imagine it would be fair to describe it as "hot garbage" also.

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