6 ms·

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 subj

by 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).

by sidlls 5y ago

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).