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The thing is, the sites that benefit most from these client-side-centric approaches are single page applications [1]. I'd imagine the benefits of having prewri
by dsrguru 14y ago
The thing is, the sites that benefit most from these client-side-centric approaches are single page applications [1]. I'd imagine the benefits of having prewritten reusable widgets are the same for SPAs as they are for desktop software. They provide computer illiterate end users with an interface consistent with other similar applications, and like any form of abstraction, they make development faster and maintenance easier.
[1] I know some JavaScript lovers are convinced that client-side rendering is better than server-side even for non-SPAs, but I'm of the rather strong opinion that they're wrong. For non-SPAs that are sufficiently complex, the sexp model of server-side rendering in Clojure, Common Lisp, and Racket produces applications that are so much more concise than their client-side DOM-manipulating equivalents. For the few sites small enough that the overhead of macro writing/bottom-up development outweighs productivity gain, rendering HTML in Rails or Django is probably better than an all-JS approach.
- nahname 14y agoWidgets have the same strengths and weakness when choosing software products to buy. If the product meets your needs exactly, it makes sense to buy. If you are going to have to customize the product to actually meet your needs, build the whole thing instead. In my experience, widgets generally end up in the second category. This is also shared by people generally looking down on things like drag and drop development. Obviously nothing is going to be faster than dragging the complex control someone wants to use into an HTML page and clicking deploy. The problem is that it is almost never the case that the user or your needs are met by the default setup. Then you start configuring and customizing the control. Developers often spend more time configuring and hacking these widgets than it would take to write something that exactly met their needs.