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My thinking on this is that everytime someone has tried to unify these tools it hasn't gone well. Think about Google Web Toolkit, or Microsoft's XAML. It's bet

by erlich 10y ago

My thinking on this is that everytime someone has tried to unify these tools it hasn't gone well. Think about Google Web Toolkit, or Microsoft's XAML. It's better to have everyone experimenting, blogging and doing their thing, and the best ideas rise to the top. 2015 was probably the worst time to be a web developer on a greenfield project. You had Angular deprecation and the Flux wars, and Babel 5 -> 6 migration. I do agree its a mess and a freaking nightmare most of the time. I've spent hundreds of hours setting my toolchain up and if something like webpack were to lose favour, I would be devastated. I think we are in need of a Rails for modern JS. My prediction is that we will see this emerge soon. A shift from project-templates to simple, generic plugin system. Webpack seems quite strong as the packager. Angular 2 CLI just migrated to webpack from Brocolli for example. React and Redux are standard now. And npm is the package manager of choice.

rpeden 10y ago
Did GWT or XAML really try to unify things? Back in 2009, I worked on a complex SPA using GWT. With GWT, you could pretend to know nothing about HTML/CSS by just using the ugly build in components, but none of the GWT users I met did that. Our app used a Model-View-Presenter structure, dependency injection, and event bus for asynchronous communication to let components know when their data had updated, plus UIBinder templates for defining the look of components (which are mostly just HTML and CSS). So although it was nicely structured, it was very much a web app, and the development experience felt pretty comparable to what I experience in React today. XAML is mostly just a way to declaratively specify the layout and structure of UI components. Actually, I think it's just a declarative syntax for creating a hierarchy of object instances. If I remember correctly, the XAML and its corresponding C# file are both partial implementations of the same class, since .NET allows partial classes. Now, I'm not saying that I think the current state of JavaScript tooling is the worst thing ever. But I do think that that some of the 2009-2010 era JavaScript frameworks provided a more sane and cohesive development experience. React and Angular are nice, but I also remember that in 2010 it felt pretty neat to create an interface in OSX's Interface Builder, and have it show up in my browser exactly the way I'd drawn it.
- erlich 10y ago
  The point I'm making is that when people have tried to develop a UI framework in a single language from scratch and offer the same functionality as the web, they fail. Performance sucks, or its not flexible enough to deliver certain functionality. By XAML I guess I mean WPF or whatever it is called. The bet was that Silverlight would be installed in every browser and you could build more powerful apps. I remember reading a post about how Evernote rewrote their WPF app because performance was never good enough. GWT tried to make a nicer API for building UIs. The API was nice, but I guess the whole transpilation caused issues with debugging etc. --- HTML, JS, CSS is evolving in such unpredictable ways, each time getting better and better. It just has such a large community using it and experimenting with it all the time - I don't think anyone can compete with the hive mind of web devs.

by erlich 10y ago

rpeden 10y ago

Did GWT or XAML really try to unify things? Back in 2009, I worked on a complex SPA using GWT. With GWT, you could pretend to know nothing about HTML/CSS by just using the ugly build in components, but none of the GWT users I met did that. Our app used a Model-View-Presenter structure, dependency injection, and event bus for asynchronous communication to let components know when their data had updated, plus UIBinder templates for defining the look of components (which are mostly just HTML and CSS). So although it was nicely structured, it was very much a web app, and the development experience felt pretty comparable to what I experience in React today. XAML is mostly just a way to declaratively specify the layout and structure of UI components. Actually, I think it's just a declarative syntax for creating a hierarchy of object instances. If I remember correctly, the XAML and its corresponding C# file are both partial implementations of the same class, since .NET allows partial classes. Now, I'm not saying that I think the current state of JavaScript tooling is the worst thing ever. But I do think that that some of the 2009-2010 era JavaScript frameworks provided a more sane and cohesive development experience. React and Angular are nice, but I also remember that in 2010 it felt pretty neat to create an interface in OSX's Interface Builder, and have it show up in my browser exactly the way I'd drawn it.

erlich 10y ago
The point I'm making is that when people have tried to develop a UI framework in a single language from scratch and offer the same functionality as the web, they fail. Performance sucks, or its not flexible enough to deliver certain functionality. By XAML I guess I mean WPF or whatever it is called. The bet was that Silverlight would be installed in every browser and you could build more powerful apps. I remember reading a post about how Evernote rewrote their WPF app because performance was never good enough. GWT tried to make a nicer API for building UIs. The API was nice, but I guess the whole transpilation caused issues with debugging etc. --- HTML, JS, CSS is evolving in such unpredictable ways, each time getting better and better. It just has such a large community using it and experimenting with it all the time - I don't think anyone can compete with the hive mind of web devs.