The whole thing is 194KB ,a normal TODOmvc demo of your favourite Js framework goes above 250KB . Really Impressive stuff. really motivates to build slimmer web apps
I wish more front-end dev's would focus on this.
os.js: JavaScript Cloud/Web Desktop Platform
61–70 of 100 posts
Re: os.js: JavaScript Cloud/Web Desktop Platform
#62An example for the "why" question -- the "web desktop with apps" style seems to work for NAS control panels (namely QNAP and Synology). As far as I know, they are using Sencha ExtJS for the UI -- which, although pretty complete and mature, doesn't get a lot of developer love. https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=qnap+control+panel https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=synology+control+pa... Here is a QNAP demo…
It's not really clear to me what functional, or even user experience benefit there is from having "draggable windows" in something like that?
Re: os.js: JavaScript Cloud/Web Desktop Platform
#63Impressive but everything is very slow for me - I've tried on my late 2015 5k iMac i7 and 2015 Macbook, both take almost a minute to load to the desktop in Firefox, granted I have a very slow internet connection at 18Mbit down 2Mbit up but given that it appears to be quite small in size something must be awry?
Re: os.js: JavaScript Cloud/Web Desktop Platform
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
Always cool to see these in action, but multiple "online desktops" have come and gone since the mid-2000s. I personally built one myself in 2010 only to realize it had been tried and failed a few times. My next instinct was that to get attention and attract users I'd need a mobile-style UI. My instincts were wrong, and your gut is right. There wasn't a strong enough use case. The motivator for these projects is typic…
> The motivator for these projects is typically something along the lines of, "it would be great if there was just one OS or interface I could use on any device." A lot of people do have this dream, but in practice it's horrible. The UI on my watch has to be very different than the UI on my flatscreen TV. This notion that things will move to a web based environment because "engineers want to head towards elegant solu…
It seems like you read the first couple of lines of my post and then skimmed through the rest of it. :) You reiterated points I made as though you're arguing with me, I'm a bit confused.
Re: dev spending. We drive development spending down because it costs far less to write software once and deploy everywhere than it does to write it for two, three or more platforms. The "elegant" goal is one compilation and/or deployment target, whether you like it or not doesn't matter, and it seems like JavaScript (or some related cousin) is going to fill that niche. Pretty silly to think that's delusional when it's already happening.
Re: os.js: JavaScript Cloud/Web Desktop Platform
#65The whole thing is 194KB ,a normal TODOmvc demo of your favourite Js framework goes above 250KB . Really Impressive stuff. really motivates to build slimmer web apps
I wish more front-end dev's would focus on this.
I agree, but I'm two months behind on implementing important features. While I can take a week here and there to optimize, my time is best spent delivering business value.
Unless you allow performance to genuinely suck (and I don't) slimming down web apps won't help my business make money. You get what current fashionable JS frameworks and build tools give me.
Re: os.js: JavaScript Cloud/Web Desktop Platform
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is the reason for requiring the single thread of execution in JavaScript? Trading race conditions for callback hell? Even the concurrency provided by web workers, suffer from the same issues, you communicate with them via messages and they will not respond to messages if they are looping away somewhere else. I'd love to have some simple pre-emption in JavaScript. Suspend code execution at one point and pick it u…
The single thread limitation is caused by the global interpreter lock[0] that's common to most interpreted languages. Along with JS, it also appears in CPython and Ruby MRI, the reference implementation of Python and Ruby respectively. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_interpreter_lock
No, it's not. MRI for example uses OS-level threads from 1.9.x onwards. The GIL prevents multiple of those threads from executing inside the interpreter at any given time, which may sound like it forces a single thread to be running but in practice most typical code will end up spending a lot of time running in C extensions or waiting on kernel space, so it's much less of a hindrance than you might think (it's still not great, but it's far better than it'd be otherwise)
Re: os.js: JavaScript Cloud/Web Desktop Platform
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wish more front-end dev's would focus on this.
I agree, but I'm two months behind on implementing important features. While I can take a week here and there to optimize, my time is best spent delivering business value. Unless you allow performance to genuinely suck (and I don't) slimming down web apps won't help my business make money. You get what current fashionable JS frameworks and build tools give me.
But you're not the one implementing the frameworks. For those, being slim is business value.
Re: os.js: JavaScript Cloud/Web Desktop Platform
#68Impressive but everything is very slow for me - I've tried on my late 2015 5k iMac i7 and 2015 Macbook, both take almost a minute to load to the desktop in Firefox, granted I have a very slow internet connection at 18Mbit down 2Mbit up but given that it appears to be quite small in size something must be awry?
Maybe the server was just under load? It was pretty much instant for me, on a similar internet connection.
Re: os.js: JavaScript Cloud/Web Desktop Platform
#69The whole thing is 194KB ,a normal TODOmvc demo of your favourite Js framework goes above 250KB . Really Impressive stuff. really motivates to build slimmer web apps
Very nice. But are you sure it doesn't load things in the background, as needed?
In fact, if it didn't do this, I'd be disappointed :)
Re: os.js: JavaScript Cloud/Web Desktop Platform
#70Too bad browser JS is single-threaded. If you switch windows the background application stops. Kind of limits its ability as a desktop replacement no matter how much effort they put into it.
> If you switch windows the background application stops.
> desktop replacement
If it replaces the desktop, there is no other window to switch to.
The problem would be with apps that block, since all multitasking (excluding web workers, but they can't do UI) must be cooperative.