Web browsers suck [excrement]
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Unfortunately, it seems the performance isn't there yet. At least not for complicated applications.
What do you mean the performance is not there? Of course is there and has been for a while now and it's getting better. Haven't you seen Unreal Engine running in WebGL? You couldn't imagine that 10 years ago.
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SPA's make sense in theory - why would the single server be doing all the work, when you can offload a lot of processing to the makeshift cloud of your users' browsers. Unfortunately, it seems the performance isn't there yet. At least not for complicated applications.
I get what you're saying, but asserting that in 2014 the performance isn't there for complicated (desktop) applications still sounds ridiculous to me.
But then again, if somebody had told me that displaying a f'ing discussion forum would be taxing in any way for a contemporary computer (or smartphone for that matter) before getting to know the very nice software that drives this forum, I would probably have thought it a joke too.
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What do you mean the performance is not there? Of course is there and has been for a while now and it's getting better. Haven't you seen Unreal Engine running in WebGL? You couldn't imagine that 10 years ago.
Yeah, and node.js is blazing fast. DOM seems to be the main bottleneck.
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It makes sense to use a MVC framework these days, but they don't have to be as heavy as Ember or Angular. Mithril is like 5kb and does most of the stuff that you want out of an MVC framework.
I prefer to use exactly what I need to get the job done and a lot of people just bung in the kitchen sink.
What does MVC have to do with the load on the client? You can build a web app using MVC architecture which requires the client to do almost nothing but display the view and communicate form data to the controller. By the same token, you can build a web app using any other architecture you desire and make it very client-intensive. I don't know for sure since I've never used them, but I bet you could even do it using frameworks like Ember and Angular. I have the feeling that "MVC Framework" is just a buzzword.
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I think devs are realising that building everything clientside isn't the way to go.
Building everything clientside isn't the problem.
Trusting on people that have poor insight into algorithms performance and excruciatingly poor insight into what makes JavaScript and the DOM tick to build everything clientside; that is the problem. And that's par for the course when you take a bunch of people that have been treating JavaScript as a 'toy' for 10+ years while they happily shat out the most grotesque pieces of code possible, of which the mal-performance would all be masked away behind the immense amount of horse-power available on the server.
Frameworks help: they simplify and provide application guidance, but most can still be easily subverted into doing the wrong thing if you do not have the first clue about what you are doing or the environment you are doing it in. Infact; it may very well make the situation worse. {{ Insert witty reference to C++ and loaded footguns here. }}
Ofcourse you can cite education or evangelism as the solution, but that is a battle you will LOSE when you are by far outgunned by idiots that will all too happily provide further fuel to the fire by giving 'helpful advice' or offering their 'profound knowledge' to others.
Effectively SPAs and JS are stuck in the uncanny 1999 PHP valley. It's going to hurt immensely to get it to move out of that sinkhole.
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JS and the HTML5 canvas let you do some awesome stuff, and they're pretty fast too (or were the last time I measured). The DOM is not (nor is AJAX, given that it is actually built on top of DOM abuse) and anything that goes over the network is going to have the perennial twin devils of latency and bandwidth to worry about.
I'd still rather avoid JS though. Just don't like it. There's something with the scope handling that sets my teeth on edge…
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I dunno, I think the DOM's pretty performant if you stop and consider the sheer about of work it has to do for every damned thing. It's also been optimized to shit in every browser for 10 years at this point.
Too bad Silverlight never caught on; imagine a Discourse built in XAML. Atwood might actually be able to achieve his idiotic vision for morons in that kind of environment.
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I dunno, I think the DOM's pretty performant if you stop and consider the sheer about of work it has to do for every damned thing. It's also been optimized to shit in every browser for 10 years at this point.
I think that you meant amount of work, but what you typed is still fitting.
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Client side MVC-esque frameworks. Ember being one of them.
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Trusting on people that have poor insight into algorithms performance and excruciatingly poor insight into what makes JavaScript and the DOM tick to build everything clientside; that is the problem. And that's par for the course when you take a bunch of people that have been treating JavaScript as a 'toy' for 10+ years while they happily shat out the most grotesque pieces of code possible, of which the mal-performance would all be masked away behind the immense amount of horse-power available on the server.
What do you think the developers are doing wrong in particular? I went through the ember source code and it seems very well engineered. No obvious problems, besides the handlebars bottleneck.
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I dunno, I think the DOM's pretty performant if you stop and consider the sheer about of work it has to do for every damned thing. It's also been optimized to shit in every browser for 10 years at this point.
It depends on the usage model. If they're insisting on keeping the document as an extant string as well as
an objecta DOM node tree, the DOM implementation will be slow as a one-legged dog. I've seen that done. It wasn't pretty. I'd hope that browsers wouldn't be implemented in such a dumb way, but I don't like to trust to hope when it comes to programs.The only really sucky bit of the HTML5 canvas is how it handles colours. It's all done with string parsing so far as I can see.
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Too bad Silverlight never caught on
And you've just lost any criteria to criticize, anything, no stupid FizzBuzz, no if-switch, not even PHP. Please, return all your badges and remove your keyboard.
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And you've just lost any criteria to criticize, anything, no stupid FizzBuzz, no if-switch, not even PHP. Please, return all your badges and remove your keyboard.
Because he liked the only credible alternative to Flash before HTML5 was a thing?
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Silverlightâ„¢ was never a credible alternative to Flashâ„¢. Yes, it brought good things to the table (late), like PlayReadyâ„¢ streaming (which I'm not sure it's a great idea of having your full stack Windows based, but whatever). And by the time Silverlightâ„¢ was a thing, Firefoxâ„¢ already supported the
<video>tag.Hell, not even Steve Jobs thought about it when he talked about having Flashâ„¢ in the iPhone back in 2010.
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And by the time Silverlight was a thing, Firefox already supported the
<video>tag.
Good for Firefox. Shame about there being other browsers though, ones that didn't support<video>. And of course those that didn't support<canvas>. Or WebGL. And all the other HTML5 goodness that, at the time, only existed in Flash and Silverlight.
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Silverlight was AWESOME, I spent 3 years as a Silverlight dev. What's to hate about C# and .NET in a web page? Microsoft's biggest mistake was marketing it as a Flash competitor, causing it to go down too when Flash sank.
We were working on porting our Silverlight app to an HTML5 one and that sucked butt.
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well that and the fact that it was unsupported, except for third party plugins that never worked 100%, on any platform other than windows...
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It worked fine on Mac, and we didn't care about Linux because we had one customer ever who used Linux and the guy was the tin-foil hat type who thought Windows existed solely to steal everything on your system.
The majority of our customers were old government workers who barely knew what a PC was, much less use alternative operating systems.
SL was fine for line-of-business apps. Nobody cares about Linux for that stuff.
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Novell Moonlight was a thing that worked, and was even mostly based on Microsoft's own code.
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At the time, our app was in Silverlight 5 and Moonlight was only (barely) SL 2.0 compatible.
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well that and the fact that it was unsupported, except for third party plugins that never worked 100%, on any platform other than windows...
There was an official Mac runtime, maintained by MS themselves. It was 99.9% compatible with all the features the Windows runtime had; the only difference was, on Mac, SL couldn't get hardware acceleration.
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on Mac, SL couldn't get hardware acceleration.
which for most purposes (I.E. Video) that would count as unsupported
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which for most purposes (I.E. Video) that would count as unsupported
Video shouldn't need hardware acceleration, not really. Except maybe for h.264 when it first came out, but not anymore. The HW-accel is more useful for the animations and alpha-blending (and the XNA-based 3D stuff added in SL5).
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bad processors get good improvements from offloading even 2D graphics to video card.
(i'm looking at you ATOM processors)
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bad processors get good improvements from offloading even 2D graphics to video card.
(i'm looking at you ATOM processors)
Speaking of which...we had this joke of a project where we needed an 10" industrial touchscreen display with UI. The dumbasses i charge made a VB6 GUI...fully fucking graphical and fancy and they were bitching and moaning that the Atom based display was lagging. No fucking duh, you idiots used a dead language(full of hacks to achieve mutlithreading via timers!) in the year 2013 to make a interactive and graphical on an Atom instead of just using WPF and C# which would actually be hardware accelerated by video chip. But what do I know, every single time I tried to stop them, one idiot kept bragging all the big major companies use VB6!!!!!
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And you've just lost any criteria to criticize, anything, no stupid FizzBuzz, no if-switch, not even PHP. Please, return all your badges and remove your keyboard.
Why? Did you ever even USE Silverlight? It was an excellent technology. It's exactly what Flash should have been evolving towards, if Adobe hadn't been sitting on their ass for that decade.
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, one idiot kept bragging all the big major companies use VB6!!!!!
bacause of that idiot.
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The best part is he was in his 20s....meaning he shouldn't really be part of a generation of VB6 users...but he was a fucking diehard.
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PINK SLIP! PINK SLIP!
There's no saving that one....
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The problem with ember js is that is 200kb minified. It is simply too big when you are developing for a phone.
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How much is it no compressed?
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Yes, actually, I use it daily to debug the stupid shit Microsoft made with PlayReadyâ„¢ and their DRM servers. On a VM far away from any damage Window might cause on my host.
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The problem with ember js is that is 200kb minified. It is simply too big when you are developing for a phone.
Yeah, that's big. Add to that mandatory jquery + handlebars.
On the other hand, it's fucking kilobytes we are talking about. With a K. Why is this still an issue in 2014?
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it's fucking kilobytes we are talking about. With a K. Why is this still an issue in 2014?
because metered cell connections where it's not uncommon to have limits of 1 or 2 GB/mo
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Yes, actually, I use it daily to debug the stupid shit Microsoft made with PlayReadyâ„¢ and their DRM servers. On a VM far away from any damage Window might cause on my host.
So the technology is bad because MICROSOFT R TEH EVILZZZZZ!!!!!!!!
Basically, "the Slashdot Defense" in action here, folks.
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Fair point. Cell phones need to die. Wireless everywhere + skype = problem solved.
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good.
luck.
with.
that.
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Fair point. Cell phones need to die. Wireless everywhere + skype = problem solved.
Not. Happening.
There are parts of the American West where getting VHF land-mobile radio in there is a pain in the ass -- if you want cell phones or anything else that's UHF or above, forgetaboutit. 2.4/5GHz WLAN signals don't stand the foggiest chance under those conditions...
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But it's wiiiiiiireless
Like magic beams of invisible light in the sky that just go places.
What do you mean you can't get me service? You're just some kind of racist bigot, aren't you?
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On a mobile connection in a highly competitive market ... YES!
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Like magic beams of invisible light in the sky that just go places.
hmm.. ok. tell you what. show me how to build a radio tower in the land of sinshine and unicorns and i'll get you service. ;-)
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But it's wiiiiiiireless
Like magic beams of invisible light in the sky that just go places.
What do you mean you can't get me service? You're just some kind of racist bigot, aren't you?
Hah. Bone up on your RF propagation. (More seriously -- mind if we stick a repeater on that hilltop over yonder?)
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Trusting on people that have poor insight into algorithms performance and excruciatingly poor insight into what makes JavaScript and the DOM tick to build everything clientside; that is the problem. And that's par for the course when you take a bunch of people that have been treating JavaScript as a 'toy' for 10+ years while they happily shat out the most grotesque pieces of code possible, of which the mal-performance would all be masked away behind the immense amount of horse-power available on the server.
There is now a clear distinction in a lot of jobs (especially in London and Manchester) between someone like me that is proficient at JS and CSS but spends at least 50% of the time on server side code and can knock out a SPROC if needed and a pure front end developer position. The expectations are quite different and I've seen this change in the last 5 years.
It isn't quite the wide-west it was 10 years ago. Yeah you still get the odd fuckwit that won't listen and doesn't want to know and does appends to the DOM ten-thousand time in a for loop, but they normally get de-hired.
Frameworks help: they simplify and provide application guidance, but most can still be easily subverted into doing the wrong thing if you do not have the first clue about what you are doing or the environment you are doing it in. Infact; it may very well make the situation worse.
That could be said about almost any language/framework/whatever yes it can be abused/misunderstood. I have been at positions where I would have loved to see something that based on a framework or even a pattern that I could recognise because the time to me being productive would have been greatly reduced.
Server side MVC frameworks all look pretty much the same, and even if you aren't an expert in the language you can get up and running and at least producing something functional. I remember building things in WebForms (took too long to learn properly) and PHP at the time (any old bodge would do), I think we are going through the same thing on the client. We had the bodge days, then the heavy frameworks and sooner or later we will settle on something that just about right.
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Fair point. Cell phones need to die. Wireless everywhere + skype = problem solved.
Skype used to be good, then they moved from decentralized to centralized when Microsoft bought it at the NSA's request
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Why is this still an issue in 2014?
Because network latency:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5lZ12Z889k
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There is now a clear distinction in a lot of jobs (especially in London and Manchester) between someone like me that is proficient at JS and CSS but spends at least 50% of the time on server side code and can knock out a SPROC if needed and a pure front end developer position. The expectations are quite different and I seen this change in the last 5 years.
I still have to explain it to every single interviewer and recruiter I talk to. They see "Javascript" and they immediately jump to "oh interactive designer!"
No, ass. I write FUCKING WEB ANALYTICS JAVASCRIPT. Your designers ain't shit compared to me, baby.
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Skype used to be good, then they moved from decentralized to centralized when Microsoft bought it at the NSA's request
NSA? No, this was totally the reptilians. You know Microsoft is built right on top of one of their secret tunnels that leads directly to the Whitehouse.
But you know there's some real kooks out there. Listen to this conspiracy theory:
Microsoft centralized their servers because 1) they have a shitload of unused server capacity in Azure now, and 2) they had a major, embarrassing, outage right after buying the product; the previously de-centralized nature of Skype's design was a major cause of the outage.
Haha! What kind of wackjob could write that?!
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Even on good old bandwidth 300kb isn't a great idea, even on a desktop PC.
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NSA? No, this was totally the reptilians. You know Microsoft is built right on top of one of their secret tunnels that leads directly to the Whitehouse.
But you know there's some real kooks out there. Listen to this conspiracy theory:
>Microsoft centralized their servers because 1) they have a shitload of unused server capacity in Azure now, and 2) they had a major, embarrassing, outage right after buying the product; the previously de-centralized nature of Skype's design was a major cause of the outage.
Haha! What kind of wackjob could write that?!
Wasn't skype centralized before Azure?
