2 ms·

I always wonder why all JavaScript client-side frameworks have such distinct design. No other dev environment for building GUIs has react-like components. Wha

I always wonder why all JavaScript client-side frameworks have such distinct design. No other dev environment for building GUIs has react-like components. What’s so special about the web that we keep creating frustrating frontend frameworks for?

gman83 5y ago
Flutter, Jetpack Compose, and SwiftUI all have React-like components.
pevey 5y ago
I personally love the front end frameworks, and I don’t find them frustrating at all. Knockout was a workhorse until angular came along. And then vuejs. And now I use sveltekit for pretty much any web app. The frameworks are popular because you can build things incredibly quickly once you know the ins and outs of your framework of choice. The component-style design, the endpoint design, so much is just driven by the needs of web-based development and the framework creator’s preferred way of abstracting away some of the challenges.
rk06 5y ago
Because there are a lot many js devs than others. Hence js ecosystem is significantly larger.
Scarblac 5y ago
The browser was intended to render documents, not applications. In particular, HTML has a tree structure, which means that things that are semantically related on the page and update together are often miles away from each other in the tree. And the page in the browser is part HTML, part CSS, part Javascript. Frameworks try to let the developer work in JS only and generate the rest. And finally, much of the application's state is often kept in a backend, and access to it a asynchronous. I think that's why Web development is so distinct from other UIs.
leonardopainter 5y ago
One reason is probably that creating UIs programmatically was historically very cumbersome in JavaScript due to various issues that are no longer relevant. That means everything had to be HTML-based hybrids of some sort.

2 ms·

I always wonder why all JavaScript client-side frameworks have such distinct design. No other dev environment for building GUIs has react-like components. Wha

by tobyhinloopen 5y ago

gman83 5y ago
Flutter, Jetpack Compose, and SwiftUI all have React-like components.
pevey 5y ago
I personally love the front end frameworks, and I don’t find them frustrating at all. Knockout was a workhorse until angular came along. And then vuejs. And now I use sveltekit for pretty much any web app. The frameworks are popular because you can build things incredibly quickly once you know the ins and outs of your framework of choice. The component-style design, the endpoint design, so much is just driven by the needs of web-based development and the framework creator’s preferred way of abstracting away some of the challenges.
rk06 5y ago
Because there are a lot many js devs than others. Hence js ecosystem is significantly larger.
Scarblac 5y ago
The browser was intended to render documents, not applications. In particular, HTML has a tree structure, which means that things that are semantically related on the page and update together are often miles away from each other in the tree. And the page in the browser is part HTML, part CSS, part Javascript. Frameworks try to let the developer work in JS only and generate the rest. And finally, much of the application's state is often kept in a backend, and access to it a asynchronous. I think that's why Web development is so distinct from other UIs.
leonardopainter 5y ago
One reason is probably that creating UIs programmatically was historically very cumbersome in JavaScript due to various issues that are no longer relevant. That means everything had to be HTML-based hybrids of some sort.