4 ms·

"Write once, mediocre everywhere" was a problem with Sun's implementation, not with the concept of cross platform code. There are tons of webapps which are ver

by MarkMc 10y ago

"Write once, mediocre everywhere" was a problem with Sun's implementation, not with the concept of cross platform code. There are tons of webapps which are very successful, despite being written 'once'. In any case, Google doesn't need to be as strict as Sun was. It is free to implement "write 90% of your code once and 10% customised for each platform".

username223 10y ago
Webapps in the sense of "fancy JavaScript" are no better than Applets. Google has the infrastructure, money, and business model to put most of the code on their servers and write native clients. Modulo privacy issues, they have found a solution.
- piyush_soni 10y ago
  Oh I bet they are! Like, anything is better than those slow, buggy and annoying Java Applets and I'm so thankful to god they're over. Did anyone ever notice how slow they were not only to 'run', but to initiate and start doing just about anything. I always knew it was a java applet even before it started anything because of its characteristic loading behavior.
  - pjmlp 10y ago
    I feel the same way when a browser Window freezes, full of JavaScript assets bigger than Doom.
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    Webapps today are the same. Their characteristic behaviour is rendering the skeleton of their UI, and then greeting you with a spinner. They take about as much to start up as Java Applets did. Now, consider the orders of magnitude improvement in computing power over the years, and notice that webapps aren't really doing anything more complicated than old applets did...
  - flukus 10y ago
    Now remember that they ran on machines with 16MB of RAM. Could this page even render on a machine like that?
    - piyush_soni 10y ago
      Not sure on that. When I was in my University we used these Java Applets. I had 4 GB of RAM at that time in my laptop, and they were still very bad.
flukus 10y ago
> There are tons of webapps which are very successful, despite being written 'once'. Actually they suffer from most of the same problems, only computers have gotten faster (masking performance issues) and our expectations have lowered. How many of these web apps obey the native OS themeing for instance?
- PhasmaFelis 10y ago
  > Actually they suffer from most of the same problems, only computers have gotten faster (masking performance issues) If an issue no longer affects anyone in any way, is it still an "issue"? Odds are that all the code you've ever written would have been considered criminally bloated at some era of computing history, but it hardly matters now.
  - flukus 10y ago
    > If an issue no longer affects anyone in any way, is it still an "issue"? I said it was masked, not gone. It still causes a lot of issues for people on resource constrained machines. > Odds are that all the code you've ever written would have been considered criminally bloated at some era of computing history, but it hardly matters now. For much of computing history where were making clear gains with newer hardware. Up to the 90's software was getting more bloated but it was doing more. Most apps today really aren't doing much/any more than we were doing in the 90's but require vastly more powerful machines.
- mercer 10y ago
  1) The fact that webapps can run relatively well strikes me as hopeful, considering how much more inefficient using HTML/CSS/JS is compared to Java applets. Or is the latter not the case (honest question)? 2) I'm not sure if our expectations have lowered much. Perhaps it's more that mobile interfaces are generally simpler and thus easier to make 'native enough'? Although I think there's more going on in regards to 2. I was never bothered so much by the UI of a java applet looking different. What bothered me was that even very fundamental stuff like input fields and scrolling felt both alien and shittier than native. And while it's certainly possible to make a web app just as shitty, if you rely on 'stock' html elements, a lot of the subtle native behavior carries over. Just a few weeks ago, for example, I built a web-app for mobile devices. It felt off immediately because the scrolling didn't feel right. All I had to do was turn on the momentum scrolling (with a line of ios-specific css), and the scrolling suddenly felt native. Had I used a hypothetical Java applet equivalent, I might've had to either go for a non-native-feeling scroll or build it myself. While I of course can't prove any of this, I think what people care about is that things feel native, not the 'skin' used to display it.
jonathanstrange 10y ago
The problem is not technical and never was, it's that Apple and Microsoft would do anything to maintain an 'application barrier' that makes genuine cross-platform coding as hard and inconvenient as possible. It's all about developer lock-in and control over the customer, even more today than it used to be in the 90s.
- K0SM0S 10y ago
  How would you caracterize Microsoft's open-sourcing of the .NET stack, support to run it on Windows and RHEL (actually support to run RHEL on Azure), VS code universal electron app, the whole Office 365 paradigm, and multiple apps like Remote? It seems to me that the 'new' Microsoft (since Satya Nadella took leadership) is changing their closed/proprietary stance on many topics. Not everything of course, they still have to sell stuff, but as far as "genuine cross-platform" is concerned, they are certainly giving developers all the tools to both make and target all major operating system.
  - josefx 10y ago
    > How would you caracterize Microsoft's open-sourcing of the .NET stack Giving anyone not on Windows a second rate experience? Core as the name says provides only a subset of the Windows .Net framework and most .Net code in the wild is written with the implicit assumption that it runs on the Windows framework. > VS code universal electron app Instead of making their main IDE a proof of concept for .Net Core they wrote a Web3.50/NodeJS IDE. I am very sensitive to high latency IDEs so that is something I wont ever touch. > the whole Office 365 paradigm Trying to keep up with the competition, Google Docs ring a bell? > since Satya Nadella took leadership Nadella 2014. Linux on Azure 2012. Office 365 2011. Mono based on Microsoft’s promise not to sue 2004. Open sourcing parts of .Net is really the only thing you can assign to Nadella, everything else was still done by the good old triple E leadership.

by MarkMc 10y ago

username223 10y ago

Webapps in the sense of "fancy JavaScript" are no better than Applets. Google has the infrastructure, money, and business model to put most of the code on their servers and write native clients. Modulo privacy issues, they have found a solution.

piyush_soni 10y ago
Oh I bet they are! Like, anything is better than those slow, buggy and annoying Java Applets and I'm so thankful to god they're over. Did anyone ever notice how slow they were not only to 'run', but to initiate and start doing just about anything. I always knew it was a java applet even before it started anything because of its characteristic loading behavior.
- pjmlp 10y ago
  I feel the same way when a browser Window freezes, full of JavaScript assets bigger than Doom.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  Webapps today are the same. Their characteristic behaviour is rendering the skeleton of their UI, and then greeting you with a spinner. They take about as much to start up as Java Applets did. Now, consider the orders of magnitude improvement in computing power over the years, and notice that webapps aren't really doing anything more complicated than old applets did...
- flukus 10y ago
  Now remember that they ran on machines with 16MB of RAM. Could this page even render on a machine like that?
  - piyush_soni 10y ago
    Not sure on that. When I was in my University we used these Java Applets. I had 4 GB of RAM at that time in my laptop, and they were still very bad.

flukus 10y ago

> There are tons of webapps which are very successful, despite being written 'once'. Actually they suffer from most of the same problems, only computers have gotten faster (masking performance issues) and our expectations have lowered. How many of these web apps obey the native OS themeing for instance?

PhasmaFelis 10y ago
> Actually they suffer from most of the same problems, only computers have gotten faster (masking performance issues) If an issue no longer affects anyone in any way, is it still an "issue"? Odds are that all the code you've ever written would have been considered criminally bloated at some era of computing history, but it hardly matters now.
- flukus 10y ago
  > If an issue no longer affects anyone in any way, is it still an "issue"? I said it was masked, not gone. It still causes a lot of issues for people on resource constrained machines. > Odds are that all the code you've ever written would have been considered criminally bloated at some era of computing history, but it hardly matters now. For much of computing history where were making clear gains with newer hardware. Up to the 90's software was getting more bloated but it was doing more. Most apps today really aren't doing much/any more than we were doing in the 90's but require vastly more powerful machines.
mercer 10y ago
1) The fact that webapps can run relatively well strikes me as hopeful, considering how much more inefficient using HTML/CSS/JS is compared to Java applets. Or is the latter not the case (honest question)? 2) I'm not sure if our expectations have lowered much. Perhaps it's more that mobile interfaces are generally simpler and thus easier to make 'native enough'? Although I think there's more going on in regards to 2. I was never bothered so much by the UI of a java applet looking different. What bothered me was that even very fundamental stuff like input fields and scrolling felt both alien and shittier than native. And while it's certainly possible to make a web app just as shitty, if you rely on 'stock' html elements, a lot of the subtle native behavior carries over. Just a few weeks ago, for example, I built a web-app for mobile devices. It felt off immediately because the scrolling didn't feel right. All I had to do was turn on the momentum scrolling (with a line of ios-specific css), and the scrolling suddenly felt native. Had I used a hypothetical Java applet equivalent, I might've had to either go for a non-native-feeling scroll or build it myself. While I of course can't prove any of this, I think what people care about is that things feel native, not the 'skin' used to display it.

jonathanstrange 10y ago

The problem is not technical and never was, it's that Apple and Microsoft would do anything to maintain an 'application barrier' that makes genuine cross-platform coding as hard and inconvenient as possible. It's all about developer lock-in and control over the customer, even more today than it used to be in the 90s.

K0SM0S 10y ago
How would you caracterize Microsoft's open-sourcing of the .NET stack, support to run it on Windows and RHEL (actually support to run RHEL on Azure), VS code universal electron app, the whole Office 365 paradigm, and multiple apps like Remote? It seems to me that the 'new' Microsoft (since Satya Nadella took leadership) is changing their closed/proprietary stance on many topics. Not everything of course, they still have to sell stuff, but as far as "genuine cross-platform" is concerned, they are certainly giving developers all the tools to both make and target all major operating system.
- josefx 10y ago
  > How would you caracterize Microsoft's open-sourcing of the .NET stack Giving anyone not on Windows a second rate experience? Core as the name says provides only a subset of the Windows .Net framework and most .Net code in the wild is written with the implicit assumption that it runs on the Windows framework. > VS code universal electron app Instead of making their main IDE a proof of concept for .Net Core they wrote a Web3.50/NodeJS IDE. I am very sensitive to high latency IDEs so that is something I wont ever touch. > the whole Office 365 paradigm Trying to keep up with the competition, Google Docs ring a bell? > since Satya Nadella took leadership Nadella 2014. Linux on Azure 2012. Office 365 2011. Mono based on Microsoft’s promise not to sue 2004. Open sourcing parts of .Net is really the only thing you can assign to Nadella, everything else was still done by the good old triple E leadership.