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> Normal javascript works fine these days for a sprinkling of front-end interactivity. jQuery is not even necessary anymore. If you just need a sprinkling of f

> Normal javascript works fine these days for a sprinkling of front-end interactivity. jQuery is not even necessary anymore. If you just need a sprinkling of front-end interactivity, you don't need a framework and you never needed it. If you're building a web application with lots of features, re-used components, complex data structures, etc., a framework helps you a lot. And the web today is full of complex web applications, since most of what used to be desktop applications 15 years ago are now web applications.

sidlls 5y ago
This is true. The question is whether it's necessary or good (for consumers, for businesses, for the software engineering profession, etc.). The answer is subjective and lies within a spectrum, surely, but I tend toward the negative end of that spectrum. I don't believe the complexity in web applications is good (for anyone, except possibly browser makers, front-end developers and framework makers) and therefore it's not really necessary. The browser today is mostly a terrible, inefficient, and limited functionality VM over the host OS, and that provides an inconsistent user experience across devices and even minor browser versions. What I've seen over the last 20 years of my lifetime has been an unfolding of a sort of tragedy of the commons in this context. We have a seeming endless supply of computational resources, "everyone" wants to exploit it in the most ruthless way possible, and it has lead to a deplorable state in the industry where bad practices and inefficiencies are not only tolerated but sought (for resume building, fast releases, whatever), and ultimately it results in terrible abuse/misuse of the resources we have.
- 7sidedmarble 5y ago
  Well not everyone is building websites on the web. Building an app for the web is not some horrible thing. Google docs, sheets, etc are all perfect examples of the kinds of apps suited to the web: ones that benefit from the ability to be accessed from anywhere on any device, and encourage collaboration.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - sidlls 5y ago
    We had this functionality before web apps were a thing. I'm not going to claim it was some golden era/glory days in a bug-free, seamless cross-device nirvana, but it's not like it was a wasteland, either. And for all the promise of cheaper, better apps that the webapp paradigm has been suggested to bring, we still pay a lot for armies of developers to write this stuff, and it's almost uniformly worse in both quality and feature completeness.
    - mattgreenrocks 5y ago
      Yeah, this is the most damning thing. It’s clear that the web platform seems to resist being tamed with our current tooling. Adding more devs doesn’t fix it. As time goes on I become more skeptical that tooling can even fix it. The impedance mismatch of a document viewer being made into a general app platform has yet to be truly overcome. All web apps try to eke out a living in the shadow of this. That it seems to be everywhere these days is more a function of economics than anything else.
      - datavirtue 5y ago
        Winner!!
- ozim 5y ago
  It is necessary and good. We are re-implementing complex "excel apps" into web applications. Amount of money I have seen lost because people were using different versions of excel sheets that were not up to date is staggering. Users expect full interactivity and instant calculations as they change values (just like in excel), doing it with "posting forms to back-end and recalculating" will not sell at all because it will be worse UX than excel. Having complex calculations over multiple fields require use of framework because making it with vanilla js is just pain with no MVVM and observables and two way bindings. Then of course if you have web app you have one database all your employees are working on and all price items can be updated easily in some admin panel for every new customer.
  - sdoering 5y ago
    > Amount of money I have seen lost because people were using different versions of excel sheets that were not up to date is staggering. Isn't that a processual problem? An organizational and structural problem? I have seen the same with Google Sheets as with Excel. I know Excel isn't liked in a lot of tech circles but I personally think MS came a long way with it. But yes - it can't solve organisational problems.
    - ozim 5y ago
      Yes but as my experience shows process/structural problems are quite easily solved with software. Then if someone has problem with process you tell them "it is software that requires it" and they comply. Organizational problems are mostly problematic to translate to software and make projects die. Because if company is not organized, they won't have possibility to organize their requirements which will lead to problems.
      - couchand 5y ago
        > process/structural problems are quite easily solved with software. My experience has been the opposite: the software is easy, but only if you already know what it needs to do. So you have to actually solve the problem first. > Then if someone has problem with process you tell them "it is software that requires it" and they comply. How incredibly user-hostile. If they have a legitimate concern, don't leave it unaddressed. If there's something important about the process they're missing, it's a mistake to use the current state of the software as an excuse.
- zdragnar 5y ago
  One established business and another startup I worked at absolutely thrived explicitly because we built web applications rather than native ones. In the first case, we kept it narrowly tailored to two pages that absolutely needed that level of interactivity. In the second, requiring customers' employees to install an app on their phones would have been a non-starter during the sales process, and the lack of an app was a major selling point for others. YMMV- oddly enough, both made use of the canvas element in critical parts (these were not simple CRUD websites).
austincheney 5y ago
https://github.com/prettydiff/share-file-systems https://github.com/prettydiff/share-file-systems That is my application that creates an OS GUI in the browser. Plenty of features with o framework. * Code size (on the front-end) 2mb unminified. * Load time in the browser (including state restoration) about 120ms. * The first version took 15 days to write from scratch. When people claim there MUST be a framework its clear they have no idea what they are talking about. It is clearly a case of Dunning-Kruger effect where they can compare their experience with frameworks on one hand... and they have nothing to compare it to, because its all they know.
- codemonkey-zeta 5y ago
  First of all, this is awesome! That being said, this project is not "0 framework". You built a framework from scratch to suit the application.
  - Supermancho 5y ago
    > That being said, this project is not "0 framework". You built a framework from scratch to suit the application. That depends on how you define framework. By this definition, any computer program has an inherent framework and the term loses it's meaning altogether. This project does not include an opinionated methodology or ideology on how to design features. There is no template nor scaffolding to plan out commonly implemented features. There is no way to estimate work for new unique functionality. There is no framework here, afaict.
- pkphilip 5y ago
  This is really nice! Congratulations! I am surprised that this isn't more famous. One comment though: please have your video in Full HD format rather than 4k. Most people don't use 4K and so it is difficult to see your product demo. And yes, I agree with you completely. There is really no need to use all of the fancy frameworks - plain vanilla js can give you quite a bit of power to build products like the one you made.
  - 5y ago
itronitron 5y ago
No, you still don't need a web UI framework for rich front-end interactivity. That assumes however that your developers know how to write a callback function.
- onion2k 5y ago
  "You don't need a framework" assumes your developers will write code that operates with everyone else's code nicely, without accidently writing something that will be painful to remove in a year's time. Frameworks generally enforce a pattern where things are quite well encapsulated, don't pollute global spaces, don't mess with prototypes, and manage callbacks well. Code written by one person, or a group of well-organised experts, also does that, but as soon as you have a less talented team, or a couple of juniors who aren't being overseen because the seniors are too busy, things creep in to the code that have the potential to blow up later. Frameworks help your team avoid those footguns (and introduce some different ones, but at least they're usually easier to manage).
  - 6510 5y ago
    but then the juniors never become the experts
    - datavirtue 5y ago
      They become managers long before that happens.
  - mattgreenrocks 5y ago
    Maybe the idea of throwing a bunch of junior devs at something is suspect to begin with?
- orcasushi 5y ago
  Yes true! I once had the honour to work with a 'tech-lead' dev that rewrote a whole map application to AngularJS, which was the hype back then. I remember him not being able to get a just slightly complicated chain of asynchronous stuff working in vanillaJS. No problem, because he had AngularJS double binding now. No need to learn vanillaJS. Wicked stuff.
jdrc 5y ago
> most of what used to be desktop applications 15 years ago are now web applications. and that was a choice
- dotancohen 5y ago
  That was a choice that very few of us made but we all have to live with. Such is life.

sidlls 5y ago

This is true. The question is whether it's necessary or good (for consumers, for businesses, for the software engineering profession, etc.). The answer is subjective and lies within a spectrum, surely, but I tend toward the negative end of that spectrum. I don't believe the complexity in web applications is good (for anyone, except possibly browser makers, front-end developers and framework makers) and therefore it's not really necessary. The browser today is mostly a terrible, inefficient, and limited functionality VM over the host OS, and that provides an inconsistent user experience across devices and even minor browser versions. What I've seen over the last 20 years of my lifetime has been an unfolding of a sort of tragedy of the commons in this context. We have a seeming endless supply of computational resources, "everyone" wants to exploit it in the most ruthless way possible, and it has lead to a deplorable state in the industry where bad practices and inefficiencies are not only tolerated but sought (for resume building, fast releases, whatever), and ultimately it results in terrible abuse/misuse of the resources we have.

7sidedmarble 5y ago
Well not everyone is building websites on the web. Building an app for the web is not some horrible thing. Google docs, sheets, etc are all perfect examples of the kinds of apps suited to the web: ones that benefit from the ability to be accessed from anywhere on any device, and encourage collaboration.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- sidlls 5y ago
  We had this functionality before web apps were a thing. I'm not going to claim it was some golden era/glory days in a bug-free, seamless cross-device nirvana, but it's not like it was a wasteland, either. And for all the promise of cheaper, better apps that the webapp paradigm has been suggested to bring, we still pay a lot for armies of developers to write this stuff, and it's almost uniformly worse in both quality and feature completeness.
  - mattgreenrocks 5y ago
    Yeah, this is the most damning thing. It’s clear that the web platform seems to resist being tamed with our current tooling. Adding more devs doesn’t fix it. As time goes on I become more skeptical that tooling can even fix it. The impedance mismatch of a document viewer being made into a general app platform has yet to be truly overcome. All web apps try to eke out a living in the shadow of this. That it seems to be everywhere these days is more a function of economics than anything else.
    - datavirtue 5y ago
      Winner!!
ozim 5y ago
It is necessary and good. We are re-implementing complex "excel apps" into web applications. Amount of money I have seen lost because people were using different versions of excel sheets that were not up to date is staggering. Users expect full interactivity and instant calculations as they change values (just like in excel), doing it with "posting forms to back-end and recalculating" will not sell at all because it will be worse UX than excel. Having complex calculations over multiple fields require use of framework because making it with vanilla js is just pain with no MVVM and observables and two way bindings. Then of course if you have web app you have one database all your employees are working on and all price items can be updated easily in some admin panel for every new customer.
- sdoering 5y ago
  > Amount of money I have seen lost because people were using different versions of excel sheets that were not up to date is staggering. Isn't that a processual problem? An organizational and structural problem? I have seen the same with Google Sheets as with Excel. I know Excel isn't liked in a lot of tech circles but I personally think MS came a long way with it. But yes - it can't solve organisational problems.
  - ozim 5y ago
    Yes but as my experience shows process/structural problems are quite easily solved with software. Then if someone has problem with process you tell them "it is software that requires it" and they comply. Organizational problems are mostly problematic to translate to software and make projects die. Because if company is not organized, they won't have possibility to organize their requirements which will lead to problems.
    - couchand 5y ago
      > process/structural problems are quite easily solved with software. My experience has been the opposite: the software is easy, but only if you already know what it needs to do. So you have to actually solve the problem first. > Then if someone has problem with process you tell them "it is software that requires it" and they comply. How incredibly user-hostile. If they have a legitimate concern, don't leave it unaddressed. If there's something important about the process they're missing, it's a mistake to use the current state of the software as an excuse.
zdragnar 5y ago
One established business and another startup I worked at absolutely thrived explicitly because we built web applications rather than native ones. In the first case, we kept it narrowly tailored to two pages that absolutely needed that level of interactivity. In the second, requiring customers' employees to install an app on their phones would have been a non-starter during the sales process, and the lack of an app was a major selling point for others. YMMV- oddly enough, both made use of the canvas element in critical parts (these were not simple CRUD websites).

austincheney 5y ago

https://github.com/prettydiff/share-file-systems https://github.com/prettydiff/share-file-systems That is my application that creates an OS GUI in the browser. Plenty of features with o framework. * Code size (on the front-end) 2mb unminified. * Load time in the browser (including state restoration) about 120ms. * The first version took 15 days to write from scratch. When people claim there MUST be a framework its clear they have no idea what they are talking about. It is clearly a case of Dunning-Kruger effect where they can compare their experience with frameworks on one hand... and they have nothing to compare it to, because its all they know.

codemonkey-zeta 5y ago
First of all, this is awesome! That being said, this project is not "0 framework". You built a framework from scratch to suit the application.
- Supermancho 5y ago
  > That being said, this project is not "0 framework". You built a framework from scratch to suit the application. That depends on how you define framework. By this definition, any computer program has an inherent framework and the term loses it's meaning altogether. This project does not include an opinionated methodology or ideology on how to design features. There is no template nor scaffolding to plan out commonly implemented features. There is no way to estimate work for new unique functionality. There is no framework here, afaict.
pkphilip 5y ago
This is really nice! Congratulations! I am surprised that this isn't more famous. One comment though: please have your video in Full HD format rather than 4k. Most people don't use 4K and so it is difficult to see your product demo. And yes, I agree with you completely. There is really no need to use all of the fancy frameworks - plain vanilla js can give you quite a bit of power to build products like the one you made.
- 5y ago

itronitron 5y ago

No, you still don't need a web UI framework for rich front-end interactivity. That assumes however that your developers know how to write a callback function.

onion2k 5y ago
"You don't need a framework" assumes your developers will write code that operates with everyone else's code nicely, without accidently writing something that will be painful to remove in a year's time. Frameworks generally enforce a pattern where things are quite well encapsulated, don't pollute global spaces, don't mess with prototypes, and manage callbacks well. Code written by one person, or a group of well-organised experts, also does that, but as soon as you have a less talented team, or a couple of juniors who aren't being overseen because the seniors are too busy, things creep in to the code that have the potential to blow up later. Frameworks help your team avoid those footguns (and introduce some different ones, but at least they're usually easier to manage).
- 6510 5y ago
  but then the juniors never become the experts
  - datavirtue 5y ago
    They become managers long before that happens.
- mattgreenrocks 5y ago
  Maybe the idea of throwing a bunch of junior devs at something is suspect to begin with?
orcasushi 5y ago
Yes true! I once had the honour to work with a 'tech-lead' dev that rewrote a whole map application to AngularJS, which was the hype back then. I remember him not being able to get a just slightly complicated chain of asynchronous stuff working in vanillaJS. No problem, because he had AngularJS double binding now. No need to learn vanillaJS. Wicked stuff.

jdrc 5y ago

> most of what used to be desktop applications 15 years ago are now web applications. and that was a choice

dotancohen 5y ago
That was a choice that very few of us made but we all have to live with. Such is life.