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As soon as you bring HTML and JS in, projects choke and die. There is just too much goldbricking and fiddling and fussing and yak shaving around possible, and a

As soon as you bring HTML and JS in, projects choke and die. There is just too much goldbricking and fiddling and fussing and yak shaving around possible, and almost none of it is in service of actually making anything. The friction binds the gears up horrifically. Something like WinForms with SQLite that didn't use Entity Framework would be far better. But really all we want is to get back to VB6 on top of Access. Maybe a few less footguns...

alexis_fr 7y ago
> As soon as you bring HTML and JS in, projects choke and die. True! I wonder whether making JS event handler in little textarea boxes would actually help. Select “Even handler for field ‘Name’ on ‘click’”, then program your event. Obviously the end result is a js file, but they user is guided...^W prevented from doing something else than modifying output before submission.
- zubairq 7y ago
  Yep, building something like this at github.com/Zubairq/pilot but it needs docker to run
caseymarquis 7y ago
I have a good amount of experience with both winforms and modern web development. I would pick winforms over vanilla html and js. However, I would easily pick vuejs (or any comparable component based web framework) over winforms. Having maintained legacy VB apps with multiple 5000+ line forms, inscrutable multidirectional event chaining, and tangled up business logic and view logic, I've become a huge fan of forced separation of concerns. The big problem is that there is much more of a learning curve. The first useful software I wrote used VB6 and winforms. Getting started was easy and intuitive, with a gentle learning curve. With virtually no experience, I was making neat things in hours. Within days I was making full applications. That says something about the power of that platform. To be truly effective with modern web development took me a year or so. That was after years of professional experience. At this point I can build web applications faster than I can build desktop software, but it took a huge time investment to reach this point, and I had to build multiple tools to make it possible. I agree that there's a niche that needs filling. I want all the benefits of modern web development, and I want a learning curve like VB6 with Access.

alexis_fr 7y ago

> As soon as you bring HTML and JS in, projects choke and die. True! I wonder whether making JS event handler in little textarea boxes would actually help. Select “Even handler for field ‘Name’ on ‘click’”, then program your event. Obviously the end result is a js file, but they user is guided...^W prevented from doing something else than modifying output before submission.

zubairq 7y ago
Yep, building something like this at github.com/Zubairq/pilot but it needs docker to run

caseymarquis 7y ago

I have a good amount of experience with both winforms and modern web development. I would pick winforms over vanilla html and js. However, I would easily pick vuejs (or any comparable component based web framework) over winforms. Having maintained legacy VB apps with multiple 5000+ line forms, inscrutable multidirectional event chaining, and tangled up business logic and view logic, I've become a huge fan of forced separation of concerns. The big problem is that there is much more of a learning curve. The first useful software I wrote used VB6 and winforms. Getting started was easy and intuitive, with a gentle learning curve. With virtually no experience, I was making neat things in hours. Within days I was making full applications. That says something about the power of that platform. To be truly effective with modern web development took me a year or so. That was after years of professional experience. At this point I can build web applications faster than I can build desktop software, but it took a huge time investment to reach this point, and I had to build multiple tools to make it possible. I agree that there's a niche that needs filling. I want all the benefits of modern web development, and I want a learning curve like VB6 with Access.