Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Introducing Rec Room

hacks.mozilla.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 65 posts

Re: Introducing Rec Room

#51

Post by sehr »

WorldWideWayne wrote: post #50

> The answer: “It’s the web; use existing web technologies.” was—and still is—a good answer. That's a terrible answer. Oh, I just need to cobble together a bunch of shitty libraries that pale in comparison to what's available on native platforms just to build a simple app that will equally pale in comparison to apps on actual native platforms? Yeah, I think I'll pass. Web technology sucks and it's holding us all back…

What a refreshing and well thought out viewpoint. I especially like the delivery of it, a perfect way to convince others!

Re: Introducing Rec Room

#52

Post by Sanddancer »

Zelphyr wrote: post #44

Maybe I'm in the minority here but this doesn't sound very appealing. I've said it before but do you really want to be a software engineer solving real problems or a glorified glue-stick gluing pieces of framework code together? All this seems to do is make it easier to glue framework code together.

It could be that you need a web frontend for a project, and all the stuff that's interesting to you is done in the backend code. Engineers in other fields use prepackaged components all the time; Jeep engineers, for example, used to use Chrysler transmissions and Chevrolet motors even when they were more than capable of building their own.

Re: Introducing Rec Room

#53

Post by EdSharkey »

WorldWideWayne wrote: post #50

> The answer: “It’s the web; use existing web technologies.” was—and still is—a good answer. That's a terrible answer. Oh, I just need to cobble together a bunch of shitty libraries that pale in comparison to what's available on native platforms just to build a simple app that will equally pale in comparison to apps on actual native platforms? Yeah, I think I'll pass. Web technology sucks and it's holding us all back…

Yes, but developer experience is only one aspect for you to consider.

Have you considered the ease of deployment/availability/potential audience size of web apps versus your native platforms? We're all just trying to make successful products, after all. And any app of significant complexity will require at least some level of craft (which I suspect is part of your gripe - no craft required, ecosystem too large.)

Also, consider that any platform like HTML5 that includes Gamepad, Audio Data, Canvas/GL, Mouse Lock, and Socket API's has evolved far beyond simple document display.

The cruelest retort I can give on HN is none at all. It must be crushing to see one's story meet the front page of HN, only to receive few/no comments, right? If you're this passionate and worked up on the subject, please give the silent treatment a go.

Re: Introducing Rec Room

#54

Post by lukeholder »

xfalcox wrote: post #27

It's kinda like Google's Web Starter Kit[1], isn't ? For me, it's really helpful when we can use some guidance from great players in the industry when choosing which framework to use. We recently forked Web Starter Kit, added some bower instructions, integrated Twitter BootStraped and now we've got some internal guidelines for new SPA. [1] https://github.com/google/web-starter-kit

wow, must have missed this release, thanks. At first glance i much prefer this stack over the mozilla one. For example gulp is far better than grunt.

Re: Introducing Rec Room

#55

Post by davidmat »

smacktoward wrote: post #33
diafygi wrote: post #18

At the end of this road, I foresee a full IDE baked into Firefox. I can't wait. It would so great if you could just open the App Manager, click "Create New App", check the boxes of the libraries you want to include by default (jQuery, Ember, etc.), and it would then generate a Hello World app folder with all those files included. Heck, Firefox Developer Tools is practically already an IDE. All that really remains for…

It's already there :-D https://hacks.mozilla.org/2014/06/webide-lands-in-nightly/ (Well, in the nightlies anyway.)

I just found out yesterday Chrome has one as well https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/chrome-dev-editor-...

Re: Introducing Rec Room

#56

Post by ilaksh »

Zelphyr wrote: post #44

Maybe I'm in the minority here but this doesn't sound very appealing. I've said it before but do you really want to be a software engineer solving real problems or a glorified glue-stick gluing pieces of framework code together? All this seems to do is make it easier to glue framework code together.

Most "real" software engineering problems have actually already been solved many times by other engineers. Take a serious look at all of the work you have done over your career. Can you honestly say that you believe you were the only person who solved those problems?

Good software engineers take full advantage of components, frameworks, and other ways to re-use code.

In fact, code reuse is one of the most important aspects of software engineering.

Re: Introducing Rec Room

#57

Post by ilaksh »

Are X-tags and Polymer compatible? Really need that web components thing to work. Seems like maybe Google and Mozilla could cooperate a little bit more?

Re: Introducing Rec Room

#58

Post by WorldWideWayne »

sehr wrote: post #51
WorldWideWayne wrote: post #50

> The answer: “It’s the web; use existing web technologies.” was—and still is—a good answer. That's a terrible answer. Oh, I just need to cobble together a bunch of shitty libraries that pale in comparison to what's available on native platforms just to build a simple app that will equally pale in comparison to apps on actual native platforms? Yeah, I think I'll pass. Web technology sucks and it's holding us all back…

What a refreshing and well thought out viewpoint. I especially like the delivery of it, a perfect way to convince others!

I'm not evangelizing here and I don't have to because what I want is going to happen eventually anyway.

Re: Introducing Rec Room

#59

Post by WorldWideWayne »

EdSharkey wrote: post #53
WorldWideWayne wrote: post #50

> The answer: “It’s the web; use existing web technologies.” was—and still is—a good answer. That's a terrible answer. Oh, I just need to cobble together a bunch of shitty libraries that pale in comparison to what's available on native platforms just to build a simple app that will equally pale in comparison to apps on actual native platforms? Yeah, I think I'll pass. Web technology sucks and it's holding us all back…

Yes, but developer experience is only one aspect for you to consider. Have you considered the ease of deployment/availability/potential audience size of web apps versus your native platforms? We're all just trying to make successful products, after all. And any app of significant complexity will require at least some level of craft (which I suspect is part of your gripe - no craft required, ecosystem too large.) Also…

> Have you considered the ease of deployment/availability/potential audience size of web apps versus your native platforms?

Sure. Do you think that a new system that is better than HTML/CSS/JS couldn't be built with that in mind? Native systems all already have hooks for easy deployment and updates and the potential audience is everybody since you need a native system to run a browser and a browser is nothing special. What we need are standards for applications. Not documents that you can script.

> Also, consider that any platform like HTML5 that includes Gamepad, Audio Data, Canvas/GL, Mouse Lock, and Socket API's has evolved far beyond simple document display.

HTML is still very, very deeply rooted in document display and browsers. That's why native apps perform better and are more popular for anything but simple data entry. Even for simple data entry, as a user I prefer native.

> If you're this passionate and worked up on the subject, please give the silent treatment a go.

I guess three sentences including a curse-word and a bit of sarcasm counts as "passionately worked up" these days :)

Re: Introducing Rec Room

#60

Post by wildpeaks »

Good initialive, although I'm surprised to see Stylus in that stack: I like stylus and nib very much, but now that there is libsass which doesn't rely on Ruby (and even compiles faster, although it doesn't support some 3.2 and 3.3 features as far as I know) and a matching npm module [1], and until there is source maps support in Stylus, SASS might be a better choice for newcomers.

[1] https://github.com/sass/node-sass

Post reply on HN