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I was stuck supporting IE6 for a lot of large organizations and was often in the loop on why they decided to stick with it. I never heard the ability to set str

by Joeri 5y ago

I was stuck supporting IE6 for a lot of large organizations and was often in the loop on why they decided to stick with it. I never heard the ability to set strict group policies as a reason. What I mostly heard was internal web apps built for IE6 which needed to be updated to support IE8, and the incredible pain to actually get those update projects approved. There was also the one customer, a large bank, who had built a custom browser around the IE6 engine, and mandated its use for bureaucratic reasons. I mostly solved our IE6 problem by moving over our web product to a single page architecture based on ExtJS in 2007. ExtJS had a browser abstraction layer, and as long as you built your screens out of its components you rarely had issues. The major pain points that remained were memory leaks (IE6 was a digital sieve, and SPA made it worse), and performance.

gjvc 5y ago
In 2007, I'm guessing that would have been ExtJS 3.x? ExtJS can be a pig to use, but the results are good, in my experience. What would you use nowadays? Have you found anything else with as complete a widget set than ExtJS?
- Joeri 5y ago
  Indeed it was ExtJS 3. Nowadays I use angular and react (different employer). They’re not as comprehensive as ExtJS but they are also more flexible. Productivity has not really improved all that much however since 2007, which I find somewhat disappointing. The lack of visual builder tools also grates on me as someone who cut his programming teeth on visual basic. It is clear to me that we are in a holding pattern for web components to become the norm and for component frameworks to become decoupled from application frameworks, so I have no idea what I will be using in 5 years.
  - SGML_ROCKSTAR 5y ago
    It is clear to me that we are in a holding pattern for web components to become the norm and for component frameworks to become decoupled from application frameworks, so I have no idea what I will be using in 5 years. So, we'll arrive to something similar to where we are with JavaScript and jQuery, where the latter is less relevant now that JavaScript is appreciably better? Meaning, that with web components the norm, we might arrive to less need for frameworks like React or Vue? (I might be misunderstanding due to the sleep deprivation, so apologies if what I write comes across as gibberish.)
    - Joeri 5y ago
      No, I think we have just as much of a need for frameworks, so you would have the same React for example, but instead of having JSX that is a combination of html5 elements and react components, you'd have JSX that is a combination of html5 elements, web components and fewer react components. That will allow for richer component libraries that share a lot more code between frameworks. In order to build those component libraries we're going to need frameworks that enable that. We've experimented with the combination react + stencil to build in this way, but there were just too many problems relating to workarounds to get things to work and performance which just wasn't good enough.

by Joeri 5y ago

gjvc 5y ago

In 2007, I'm guessing that would have been ExtJS 3.x? ExtJS can be a pig to use, but the results are good, in my experience. What would you use nowadays? Have you found anything else with as complete a widget set than ExtJS?

Joeri 5y ago
Indeed it was ExtJS 3. Nowadays I use angular and react (different employer). They’re not as comprehensive as ExtJS but they are also more flexible. Productivity has not really improved all that much however since 2007, which I find somewhat disappointing. The lack of visual builder tools also grates on me as someone who cut his programming teeth on visual basic. It is clear to me that we are in a holding pattern for web components to become the norm and for component frameworks to become decoupled from application frameworks, so I have no idea what I will be using in 5 years.
- SGML_ROCKSTAR 5y ago
  It is clear to me that we are in a holding pattern for web components to become the norm and for component frameworks to become decoupled from application frameworks, so I have no idea what I will be using in 5 years. So, we'll arrive to something similar to where we are with JavaScript and jQuery, where the latter is less relevant now that JavaScript is appreciably better? Meaning, that with web components the norm, we might arrive to less need for frameworks like React or Vue? (I might be misunderstanding due to the sleep deprivation, so apologies if what I write comes across as gibberish.)
  - Joeri 5y ago
    No, I think we have just as much of a need for frameworks, so you would have the same React for example, but instead of having JSX that is a combination of html5 elements and react components, you'd have JSX that is a combination of html5 elements, web components and fewer react components. That will allow for richer component libraries that share a lot more code between frameworks. In order to build those component libraries we're going to need frameworks that enable that. We've experimented with the combination react + stencil to build in this way, but there were just too many problems relating to workarounds to get things to work and performance which just wasn't good enough.