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I think it is interesting where the web is heading and where react.js and next.js are heading. Back to server side rendering, static pages/resources. All things

I think it is interesting where the web is heading and where react.js and next.js are heading. Back to server side rendering, static pages/resources. All things we did about 10 years ago with Rails. In my opinion we went the wrong way with JavaScript to a degree. SPAs (single page apps) where overhyped and we tried to solve problems with it that would have benefited from just plain old web applications. Now instead of sparingly using SPAs and going with traditional web apps we are sort of developing our modern SPAish frameworks in the direction of traditional web apps.

Flankk 5y ago
I agree that we went wrong with JS. We've just made the best of the the garbage tech we were given (XML, CSS). At the end of the day, the web was designed for serving documents. I think the whole idea of web applications needs to be reimagined at some point. Something like a browser that serves bytecode. Maybe WebAssembly will take us there but it's honestly ridiculous the unnecessary complexity we deal with to solve simple problems.
- poulsbohemian 5y ago
  > I think the whole idea of web applications needs to be reimagined I'd argue this is what's happening with mobile apps. It isn't hard to imagine the majority of consumer-facing applications delivered by mobile or tablet first, with a web app as secondary or even some vendors skipping entirely.
- johntdaly 5y ago
  Don’t get me wrong. I think there where places where JavaScript, SPAs and so on where the right decision but we used the same tech all over the place. I think that is the negative impact of working in a future oriented industry and one of the reasons you might want some older people in your team to prevent new projects to be started on new tech JUST because it is cool now. But even within the JavaScript community and the tech there I sort of like Ember.js and it grew out of the Ruby and Rails community. It is not perfect but it fits SPAs perfectly and there is integration into Rails that makes the data handling less tedious (still need to try because unfortunately I got none ember projects + rails or ember + node.js). If I take my none Ruby and none Rails experiences of the last years I have to say I trust tech that comes from Ruby and Rails guys in other techs more. You can accuse me of Ruby chauvinism but I do believe that we as a community where better able to foster good taste in technology solutions.
  - joelbluminator 5y ago
    Ember is pretty nice as a framework but the harsh truth is the community barely exists. As an Ember noob the fact that many Stackoverflow answers on Ember are outdated (Ember has changed a lot between versions), and many things are simply not answered or blogged on, is a massive productivity hit. Our company is now stuck with Ember, not happily married to it.
    - johntdaly 5y ago
      You are not wrong, there where a lot of changes over the 3.x time frames and the info you can find online is often out of date. The community is small and most people are more interested in React, Vue or Angular. I still hope that something can be done since when it comes to SPAs I think Ember is a better solution than React, Vue or Angular.
      - joelbluminator 5y ago
        I agree. Other than the template part(handlebars) Ember is pretty sweet. It's a shame it got to the state it's in but it is what it is.

Flankk 5y ago

I agree that we went wrong with JS. We've just made the best of the the garbage tech we were given (XML, CSS). At the end of the day, the web was designed for serving documents. I think the whole idea of web applications needs to be reimagined at some point. Something like a browser that serves bytecode. Maybe WebAssembly will take us there but it's honestly ridiculous the unnecessary complexity we deal with to solve simple problems.

poulsbohemian 5y ago
> I think the whole idea of web applications needs to be reimagined I'd argue this is what's happening with mobile apps. It isn't hard to imagine the majority of consumer-facing applications delivered by mobile or tablet first, with a web app as secondary or even some vendors skipping entirely.
johntdaly 5y ago
Don’t get me wrong. I think there where places where JavaScript, SPAs and so on where the right decision but we used the same tech all over the place. I think that is the negative impact of working in a future oriented industry and one of the reasons you might want some older people in your team to prevent new projects to be started on new tech JUST because it is cool now. But even within the JavaScript community and the tech there I sort of like Ember.js and it grew out of the Ruby and Rails community. It is not perfect but it fits SPAs perfectly and there is integration into Rails that makes the data handling less tedious (still need to try because unfortunately I got none ember projects + rails or ember + node.js). If I take my none Ruby and none Rails experiences of the last years I have to say I trust tech that comes from Ruby and Rails guys in other techs more. You can accuse me of Ruby chauvinism but I do believe that we as a community where better able to foster good taste in technology solutions.
- joelbluminator 5y ago
  Ember is pretty nice as a framework but the harsh truth is the community barely exists. As an Ember noob the fact that many Stackoverflow answers on Ember are outdated (Ember has changed a lot between versions), and many things are simply not answered or blogged on, is a massive productivity hit. Our company is now stuck with Ember, not happily married to it.
  - johntdaly 5y ago
    You are not wrong, there where a lot of changes over the 3.x time frames and the info you can find online is often out of date. The community is small and most people are more interested in React, Vue or Angular. I still hope that something can be done since when it comes to SPAs I think Ember is a better solution than React, Vue or Angular.
    - joelbluminator 5y ago
      I agree. Other than the template part(handlebars) Ember is pretty sweet. It's a shame it got to the state it's in but it is what it is.