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Ferro – Simplifying web development, no more HTML

easydatawarehousing.github.io

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Re: Ferro – Simplifying web development, no more HTML

#61

Post by MrBra »

detuur wrote: post #55
krapp wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see how writing Ruby and managing a Ruby abstraction of the DOM is an improvement over writing JS and managing the DOM with that. Unless the only purpose to this is to just not write javascript.

It is. Its elevator pitch is literally "write your website in Ruby". I think it's very silly, especially considering that WebAssembly has just matured, and it's been coming for a looong time. Not to mention it's 10x better supported. If your website only runs on 90% of browsers out there, it's a terrible website. And this thing as far as I can tell only runs on last-gen Firefox and Chrome.

It is not, check my answer to @krapp.

Re: Ferro – Simplifying web development, no more HTML

#62

Post by MrBra »

krapp wrote: post #52
MrBra wrote: post #19

For a moment I forgot this is homeland of JS-at-any-cost :) so to let this go through a bit more I'll just post excerpts from the linked website: --- Introduction Simplifying web-development with Ferro - An example Imagine a webpage that displays a form with a checkbox and an input field. The input should only be enabled when the checkbox is checked. This kind of logic is best handled by the webbrowser, not the webse…

Please don't just copy and paste from the website... it's obnoxious. We see the link, we can read.

Judging from the comments, the majority just read the title, interpreted it wrong, and commented accordingly, so yes, I thought it was necessary to avoid misinformation for other people coming here.

Re: Ferro – Simplifying web development, no more HTML

#64

Post by ricardobeat »

MrBra wrote: post #57
ricardobeat wrote: post #50

Hard to get past the wall of misinformation: > What we don't need when using Ferro > HTML > Javascript DOM finders (like jQuery, Zepto, ...) > Javascript libraries/frameworks that extend html (like Ember, Angular, JSX, Vue, Stimulus) > Shadow DOM Javascript frameworks (like React) jQuery and Zepto are not “DOM finders”, they are cross-browser compatibility layers (that include querySelector). “Frameworks that extend…

Whatever they are, they suck. Actually what sucks is not them specifically, but the reason because they exist. Ferro makes the whole process more natural, at least.

It’s easy (and meaningless) to criticise while not fully understanding what they do.

From an architecture standpoint, this is very similar to building a tree of Backbone views + a few abstractions. Writing OO code instead of a markup language (JSX/HTML) has few intrinsic benefits besides “feels familiar to me”. And it goes head on against the resurgence of functional programming, reactive UI and declarative code. You need much more than “they suck” if you want to profess that your system is better.

Not to say this isn’t worth exploring, but the bold and dismissive claims detract a lot from the project’s idea.

Re: Ferro – Simplifying web development, no more HTML

#65

Post by easydwh »

I am the author of the _Opal-Ferro library_ and the _website_ this thread links to. Thanks for all your comments.

Please note that the website is a technical demo of the ferro library and gives some background information about how it works. The intended target audience of the website are web- and software developers. I didn't invest a lot of time in browser compatibility since web developers tend to use newer browsers. Edge 15 is excluded because it doesn't fully support CSS grid. I'm not a very good web designer nor a CSS expert, so the website is a little bit rough around the edges. Please don't shoot the messenger/website.

Ruby's is all about programmer happiness. My intention with ferro is to increase web-developer happiness. What makes me as a web developer unhappy is front-end frameworks (regardless of the language they are written in). Using a front-end framework usually involves a mix of some server-side rendered html, a bunch of code and a templating language. The templating language looks like html but with extra syntax added to connect with the js code. In other words to be able to move application logic from the server to the web browser an even more complex version of html is used. And I need to write in 3 different languages. Very unhappy.

Ferro tries to solve this problem in a different way. By getting rid of html (and thus any links between html and code) and replacing this with code to create a memory structure that fits the application you want to build. The ferro library handles the creation of the necessary DOM elements. The web developer only needs to write in 1 language (apart from CSS). I think that this makes front-end web development much simpler. And me a lot happier.

Some folks mentioned that html is used for tasks it wasn't intended for. I agree, html was originally created as a markup language with some meta data added. Kind of what we use markdown for these days. All sorts of things were bolted on later: styling cues, document structure, semantical elements, js code. It works but it makes separation of responsibilities (structure/content/styling/logic) harder. Internally a web browser doesn't even use html, but only keeps a memory structure we all know as the DOM. Html is one way of telling the web browser what the DOM should look like. For simple web pages that is absolutely fine. For (progressive) web apps html is not ideal.

Re: Ferro – Simplifying web development, no more HTML

#66

Post by MrBra »

ricardobeat wrote: post #64
MrBra wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whatever they are, they suck. Actually what sucks is not them specifically, but the reason because they exist. Ferro makes the whole process more natural, at least.

It’s easy (and meaningless) to criticise while not fully understanding what they do. From an architecture standpoint, this is very similar to building a tree of Backbone views + a few abstractions. Writing OO code instead of a markup language (JSX/HTML) has few intrinsic benefits besides “feels familiar to me”. And it goes head on against the resurgence of functional programming, reactive UI and declarative code. You…

> if you want to profess that your system is better.

Not sure if you thought I am the project creator or if you were just generally speaking. Anyway, if you wanted to know more about the rationale behind this project, you could address author's comment here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16571142

Re: Ferro – Simplifying web development, no more HTML

#67

Post by benbristow »

teleclimber wrote: post #47
benbristow wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you have JS disabled anyway?

I disable JS more and more often because of all the crap popups and email signup forms etc... I use this extension which makes it easy to toggle on a per-site basis: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/quick-javascript-s...

You just make it harder for web developers to provide nice experiences.

If it's broken, don't expect us to fix it.

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