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> Flash had excellent authoring tools aimed at animators. Electron has excellent authoring tools aimed at web developers. Namely, the ones they are already usi

by johnfn 10y ago

> Flash had excellent authoring tools aimed at animators. Electron has excellent authoring tools aimed at web developers. Namely, the ones they are already using. That's kinda the whole point. :) I don't disagree with you. The Flash authoring tools WERE amazing. When I'm feeling in a trolling mood, I tell people that Flash is still ahead of JS and HTML5. Not only was the IDE incredible, but AS3 was literally a typed version of JavaScript with XML liberals. That's right, it had the best from JavaScript, TypeScript and JSX, 10 years before any of that existed in the front end web development toolkit. And you guys hate on Flash! :)

coldtea 10y ago
>Electron has excellent authoring tools aimed at web developers. Namely, the ones they are already using. You must have a very different definition of excellence if you believe that the current web authoring tools (whatever IDE or editor + plugins people use) are in any way close to "excellent".
- derefr 10y ago
  What would you expect web development to be like? I mean, holding static the requirements that the resultant DOM has to: 1. reflow when resized (unlike a PDF); 2. work with screen-readers (unlike naive custom rendering engines in games et al); 3. work with accessibility-enabling UA stylesheets (unlike native UI toolkits); 4. be printable without a separately-authored for-print version; 5. if stateful, uses idiomatic HTTP request/response cycles that enable network-level HTTP caching; 5. if a web-app, talks to a simple mostly-stateless HTTP API that can also be consumed unchanged by API client libraries. There is a reason that Dreamweaver and Publisher are separate apps; and there is a reason Rails/Phoenix/etc. don't support server-side stateful controls like Seaside or the IBM 3270 terminal protocol do. The web is its own thing, and as long as the web is the thing we're targeting, the authoring tools we have are likely about as good as we're gonna get. (Unless, that is, you can teach your devs to think in terms of distributed actor systems, where all your Javascript code assumes any actor could be remote like in an Erlang system. Then we could have our UI builders and transparently server-ize them too. But would anyone put up with it?)
  - candiodari 10y ago
    How about the paradigm that was in use for, oh, 3-4 decades, before the web ? The general idea: void OnPaint(PaintCommands p, Rect limitToRect) You can finally sort-of do this, with RequestAnimationFrame and Canvas maximized, and it is indeed way faster than HTML, at least, on my desktop. It resizes if that's what you do inside of it. For games this is pretty much mandatory. It still sucks in many ways though. More could be achieved with just directly exposing OnPaint, 2d and 3d versions. Plus various basic things, like copy-paste, don't work. It doesn't satisfy half your demands, I realize that (though windows accessibility can be quite good too, and the web's accessibility sucks badly). But I would argue that having actual complex apps was worth more (compare MS Office to Office 360 or Google Docs, or worse, compare things like Corel Draw or Lucidchart to the Lucidchart web app, or any other HTML5 drawing/charting app). And let's just not talk about Desktop Games versus either web games or even phone games. It's depressing.
    - majewsky 10y ago
      Have fun fulfilling any sort of accessibility requirements with this.
- johnfn 10y ago
  In terms of "easy to begin using", there really is no comparison. I know there are other metrics, but you have to admit that's a big one.
Joeri 10y ago
Back in 2005 I was tasked to write a web-based CAD viewer. Flash with AS2 was an obvious no-brainer. It could do complex cross-browser high-performance graphics, and AS2 was a mature typed programming language that could be used to program in the large (using an event- and component-based API). It was fast and really easy to program for. I never even used the animation tools, and I still thought it was amazing. By contrast, javascript was still that weird language almost no one took seriously, before jquery, before "the good parts". It had abysmal performance (way worse than flash), and couldn't do cross-browser graphics (firefox released some basic SVG support towards the end of that year, IE6 had that weird VML thing, and adobe had a slow bloated SVG browser plugin which crashed every 5 minutes). So, yeah, back in its prime, flash was unbeatable for client-side apps and games. But, things change.
majewsky 10y ago
> XML liberals I assume you meant "literals"? If not, they have my vote. ;)

by johnfn 10y ago

coldtea 10y ago

>Electron has excellent authoring tools aimed at web developers. Namely, the ones they are already using. You must have a very different definition of excellence if you believe that the current web authoring tools (whatever IDE or editor + plugins people use) are in any way close to "excellent".

derefr 10y ago
What would you expect web development to be like? I mean, holding static the requirements that the resultant DOM has to: 1. reflow when resized (unlike a PDF); 2. work with screen-readers (unlike naive custom rendering engines in games et al); 3. work with accessibility-enabling UA stylesheets (unlike native UI toolkits); 4. be printable without a separately-authored for-print version; 5. if stateful, uses idiomatic HTTP request/response cycles that enable network-level HTTP caching; 5. if a web-app, talks to a simple mostly-stateless HTTP API that can also be consumed unchanged by API client libraries. There is a reason that Dreamweaver and Publisher are separate apps; and there is a reason Rails/Phoenix/etc. don't support server-side stateful controls like Seaside or the IBM 3270 terminal protocol do. The web is its own thing, and as long as the web is the thing we're targeting, the authoring tools we have are likely about as good as we're gonna get. (Unless, that is, you can teach your devs to think in terms of distributed actor systems, where all your Javascript code assumes any actor could be remote like in an Erlang system. Then we could have our UI builders and transparently server-ize them too. But would anyone put up with it?)
- candiodari 10y ago
  How about the paradigm that was in use for, oh, 3-4 decades, before the web ? The general idea: void OnPaint(PaintCommands p, Rect limitToRect) You can finally sort-of do this, with RequestAnimationFrame and Canvas maximized, and it is indeed way faster than HTML, at least, on my desktop. It resizes if that's what you do inside of it. For games this is pretty much mandatory. It still sucks in many ways though. More could be achieved with just directly exposing OnPaint, 2d and 3d versions. Plus various basic things, like copy-paste, don't work. It doesn't satisfy half your demands, I realize that (though windows accessibility can be quite good too, and the web's accessibility sucks badly). But I would argue that having actual complex apps was worth more (compare MS Office to Office 360 or Google Docs, or worse, compare things like Corel Draw or Lucidchart to the Lucidchart web app, or any other HTML5 drawing/charting app). And let's just not talk about Desktop Games versus either web games or even phone games. It's depressing.
  - majewsky 10y ago
    Have fun fulfilling any sort of accessibility requirements with this.
johnfn 10y ago
In terms of "easy to begin using", there really is no comparison. I know there are other metrics, but you have to admit that's a big one.

Joeri 10y ago

Back in 2005 I was tasked to write a web-based CAD viewer. Flash with AS2 was an obvious no-brainer. It could do complex cross-browser high-performance graphics, and AS2 was a mature typed programming language that could be used to program in the large (using an event- and component-based API). It was fast and really easy to program for. I never even used the animation tools, and I still thought it was amazing. By contrast, javascript was still that weird language almost no one took seriously, before jquery, before "the good parts". It had abysmal performance (way worse than flash), and couldn't do cross-browser graphics (firefox released some basic SVG support towards the end of that year, IE6 had that weird VML thing, and adobe had a slow bloated SVG browser plugin which crashed every 5 minutes). So, yeah, back in its prime, flash was unbeatable for client-side apps and games. But, things change.

majewsky 10y ago

> XML liberals I assume you meant "literals"? If not, they have my vote. ;)