4 ms·

>as a fan of Blazor I really dislike this stuff. It's easy-ish to write, but it's like the authors of it hate everything about the web. SPAs do a lot of annoy

by knome 3y ago

>as a fan of Blazor I really dislike this stuff. It's easy-ish to write, but it's like the authors of it hate everything about the web. SPAs do a lot of annoying stuff, and blazor encourages all of it. I really hope things swing back away from this grotesque tight binding between the server and the client.

gwbas1c 3y ago
One of the nice things about SPAs is that they allow navigation without the latency needed to re-load all assets. You can get there the old-fashioned way if all your assets are cached in the browser with long timeouts; but that implies that you're doing something like putting hashes in the asset URL and hashing them as part of your build process. (This, is why loading JavaScript and CSS from CDNs helps with performance.) Otherwise, every time you navigate to a new page on a non-SPA, the browser still needs to send an IF-CHANGED-SINCE request to the server. As a developer, though, the BIG drawback of SPAs is that they require building much stricter APIs for everything. In a traditional server-side HTML page, you can quickly prototype something where the code that's putting together the HTML has access to privileged data that you can't expose through an API. (IE, if you just need to prototype something, server-side HTML rendering code can directly talk to the database.)
- ptx 3y ago
  > One of the nice things about SPAs is that they allow navigation without the latency needed to re-load all assets. [...] You can get there the old-fashioned way if [...] you're doing something like putting hashes in the asset URL and hashing them as part of your build process. But that solves the problem, doesn't it? And it seems a lot simpler than implementing an SPA. Django has this feature built-in. You just have to enable ManifestStaticFilesStorage: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/4.2/ref/contrib/staticfiles/#django.contrib.staticfiles.storage.ManifestStaticFilesStorage https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/4.2/ref/contrib/staticfile...
  - gwbas1c 3y ago
    > And it seems a lot simpler than implementing an SPA Depends on your design goals. BTW, I'm not pro/against SPAs. It's just a tool, and like all tools, they have their advantages and disadvantages. In general, the fact that you can update the page without a server-side round trip is a major advantage. Granted, you can also do that with server-side rendering; but then your rendering logic is defined in two places.
dagaci 3y ago
I think you’re a little misconceived, WebAssembly runs entirely in the client and have no bindings to the server, as far as the server is concerned such apps may as well be static HTML. This is Blazor WebAssembly. It will be just as trivial to run such on Mac, Linux or Windows server or any other plain web servers. TeaVM seems to be the same except it compiles Java to JavaScript which means has fast startup times. Web browsers and their fundamental development foundations are best described as a set of mostly well meaning compromises, and so even modern browsers have been updated to support all the other disagreeable things you have mentioned, even having the ability to navigate the browser history within an SPA
- knome 3y ago
  Ah, sure, for whatever WASM variant you're referring to. Whichever form of blazor I use pretty obviously makes calls back to the server to interact with client state on a per-event basis. If the backend has to restart, the clients all lose connection and die. I won't pretend to be an expert in the framework, or even C#. I had avoided both until recently, and this introduction hasn't made me particularly fond of either.
  - gwbas1c 3y ago
    Server-side or WASM is an option when you create a Blazor project in Visual Studio. You can write libraries and either approach can use the same library. Server-side Blazor keeps a websocket open to send messages back and forth. If you can tolerate the latency, it allows your UI code to be able to handle data that needs to remain secret on the server.
  - dagaci 3y ago
    Its pretty fundamental stuff to know the difference between what is server side and what is client side. I think you will have a lot of trouble undertanding a framework without this. Blazor WebAssemly requires you make explicity Ajax-like Calls to external web services in order to interact with a server and data. There is no server side framework in WebAssembly for maintaining state. State is entirely client side. Blazor Server basically uses Web Sockets (with fallbacks) to communicate changes between client and server, this is far more efficient than using http request calls. State here is server side. But differs from all other frameworks in that state is trasmitted over sockets not http requests. I'm not convinced you have actually used any kind blazor tbh

by knome 3y ago

gwbas1c 3y ago

One of the nice things about SPAs is that they allow navigation without the latency needed to re-load all assets. You can get there the old-fashioned way if all your assets are cached in the browser with long timeouts; but that implies that you're doing something like putting hashes in the asset URL and hashing them as part of your build process. (This, is why loading JavaScript and CSS from CDNs helps with performance.) Otherwise, every time you navigate to a new page on a non-SPA, the browser still needs to send an IF-CHANGED-SINCE request to the server. As a developer, though, the BIG drawback of SPAs is that they require building much stricter APIs for everything. In a traditional server-side HTML page, you can quickly prototype something where the code that's putting together the HTML has access to privileged data that you can't expose through an API. (IE, if you just need to prototype something, server-side HTML rendering code can directly talk to the database.)

ptx 3y ago
> One of the nice things about SPAs is that they allow navigation without the latency needed to re-load all assets. [...] You can get there the old-fashioned way if [...] you're doing something like putting hashes in the asset URL and hashing them as part of your build process. But that solves the problem, doesn't it? And it seems a lot simpler than implementing an SPA. Django has this feature built-in. You just have to enable ManifestStaticFilesStorage: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/4.2/ref/contrib/staticfiles/#django.contrib.staticfiles.storage.ManifestStaticFilesStorage https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/4.2/ref/contrib/staticfile...
- gwbas1c 3y ago
  > And it seems a lot simpler than implementing an SPA Depends on your design goals. BTW, I'm not pro/against SPAs. It's just a tool, and like all tools, they have their advantages and disadvantages. In general, the fact that you can update the page without a server-side round trip is a major advantage. Granted, you can also do that with server-side rendering; but then your rendering logic is defined in two places.

dagaci 3y ago

I think you’re a little misconceived, WebAssembly runs entirely in the client and have no bindings to the server, as far as the server is concerned such apps may as well be static HTML. This is Blazor WebAssembly. It will be just as trivial to run such on Mac, Linux or Windows server or any other plain web servers. TeaVM seems to be the same except it compiles Java to JavaScript which means has fast startup times. Web browsers and their fundamental development foundations are best described as a set of mostly well meaning compromises, and so even modern browsers have been updated to support all the other disagreeable things you have mentioned, even having the ability to navigate the browser history within an SPA

knome 3y ago
Ah, sure, for whatever WASM variant you're referring to. Whichever form of blazor I use pretty obviously makes calls back to the server to interact with client state on a per-event basis. If the backend has to restart, the clients all lose connection and die. I won't pretend to be an expert in the framework, or even C#. I had avoided both until recently, and this introduction hasn't made me particularly fond of either.
- gwbas1c 3y ago
  Server-side or WASM is an option when you create a Blazor project in Visual Studio. You can write libraries and either approach can use the same library. Server-side Blazor keeps a websocket open to send messages back and forth. If you can tolerate the latency, it allows your UI code to be able to handle data that needs to remain secret on the server.
- dagaci 3y ago
  Its pretty fundamental stuff to know the difference between what is server side and what is client side. I think you will have a lot of trouble undertanding a framework without this. Blazor WebAssemly requires you make explicity Ajax-like Calls to external web services in order to interact with a server and data. There is no server side framework in WebAssembly for maintaining state. State is entirely client side. Blazor Server basically uses Web Sockets (with fallbacks) to communicate changes between client and server, this is far more efficient than using http request calls. State here is server side. But differs from all other frameworks in that state is trasmitted over sockets not http requests. I'm not convinced you have actually used any kind blazor tbh