18 ms·

I’m done with the web

• jtchang 14y ago
  Are you seriously telling web developers they don't deal with learning a new tool almost every day?! How many damn Javascript libraries do we constantly integrate and learn? New css like languages (scss,less). Server side languages? I'm sick and tired of people saying web developers are somehow 2nd class programmers who only understand HTML.
• clintjhill 14y ago
  Your day job is to build a piece of web software and you can’t take a few days to learn the ins and outs? This is the opinion I had when all of the previous Ember flare ups happened. My thoughts were exactly this. It would behoove so many of us to simply spend more time with new technology and ideas before we simply throw our hands up and say "it confuses me".
  • delinka 14y ago
    "Confusion" is not the word I would use. Metaphorical "you" alert, not directed at parent: You have a new-fangled thing for everyone to use. Scratch that, everyone who's been in your shoes, with your particular pains. Great, you solved a problem. Take some time to explain on your blog or in your GitHub README.md the context of your solution. "Because I can!" is a fine reason, but I don't spend time exploring something that was built because it was possible to build it. So your new-fangled thing looks like it's a solution to a problem I'm having. I start to implement it and ... oh dear $DEITY, it's a mess. I don't mean it's ugly, I mean it's completely inextensible. It's a specific solution where a generic one would suffice. Or worse, you didn't think outside your little box to discover that this "fix" will debilitate 95% of the web servers on the planet if they were to try this solution. My advice: if you build it, A) explain why, B) learn to build it well.
    • clintjhill 14y ago
      Fair. I'm only suggesting that before we collectively steam roll an open source project and its volunteers with "I don't get it, so it sucks" mobs, that maybe we spend a weekend with it. Maybe over that weekend we learn "oh dear $DEITY". And maybe, just maybe we contribute back to it in an effort to "help".
• darxius 14y ago
  > This reaction to Ember just baffles me. Your day job is to build a piece of web software and you can’t take a few days to learn the ins and outs? Couldn't agree more. While I do think that new technology should be intuitive and easy to use, you have to take the time to explore, learn and familiarize yourself with it. I think peoples' attention spans are way too short these days.
  • k3n 14y ago
    Time is money, and the larger your team is the more that the costs of learning a new tech are amplified. Using his off-the-cuff, totally subjective "a few days" estimate, and assigning 'few' at a conservative 2 days, that would mean my team would spend roughly 50 days doing nothing but learning this one very specific technology. That's 50 days of not producing revenue or otherwise addressing client concerns. Now, I'm not saying that we shouldn't be able to take time to do things like this (learn and embed new tech), but to dismissively say "a few days" like it's trivial is severely underestimating the impact of dropping everything during that time to do nothing but learn about a tech that will most likely be obsolete or superseded in only a few years time.
• jacquesm 14y ago
  > The community has tossed out everything we’ve learned from the last 30 years of building applications in favor of being able to put something together quickly with complete disregard for maintainability or extendability. That's spot on. You can add in to that that all the lessons of the process of developing software have also been discarded and are slowly being re-learned. It is as if with the birth of the web there was a complete reboot of the IT industry which accidentally also re-formatted the drive that held our knowledge about how you go about software development (which is different from knowledge about what it is that you are building, and different still from the technical details of your implementation). On top of all that the web is incredibly messy.
  • lukifer 14y ago
    > On top of all that the web is incredibly messy. That is arguably both a bug and a feature. The web is an untended jungle, possibly the most diverse of any technical ecosystem. Democracy and markets are messy too, but I think most of us would rather not give those up.
    • jacquesm 14y ago
      When it comes to technology messy is not a feature but a drawback. It precludes a very important thing from manifesting itself, reliability. The difference between the backbone of the internet (TCP/IP) compared to the maze that is web development is simply astounding. The amount of hoops you have to jump through to do stuff that was child's play on any computer 20+ years ago just because it is on the web completely baffles me. People are actually proud of being able to make simple games or chat services using a browser. That is because it is so terribly difficult to do such simple things using the web as a delivery device. - HTML - JavaScript - CSS - Server side code (pick your flavor) - HTTP - websockets - some real time extension (node or whatever) - a persistence layer And all that for the basic functionality of tying a few people on graphics terminals to each other. Oh, and to make it more interesting we're shipping actual code from one location to another so you have a few security nightmares extra.
      • 14y ago
• peterhunt 14y ago
  Amen brother. A lot of the problems stem from the cargo culting of various technologies and patterns (I'm looking at you, inflexible templating languages). Also a lot of these issues come from looking at each piece in the development cycle separately rather than holistically. Frameworks like meteor are starting to address this, but we still have a lot of work to do.
• math0ne 14y ago
  Interesting, but you must admit that most of the web is simple and it's always best to use simple tools to build simple products.
• rolleiflex 14y ago
  >Ember is very close to the “micro” side of things, but at a “whopping” 49KB (less than a second download on a dial-up internet connection Chances are that you probably never had a dial-up connection. 49KB on dial-up generally takes around 10 seconds. Besides this point, the accusatory tone towards front-end developers and 'the rest of the world' that did not understand you isn't helping to get your point across. You were in the wrong place in wrong time. It happens. Move on. There are better things to do, and bitterness only hurts yourself.
  • Cushman 14y ago
    Perhaps someone forgot to multiply by 8.
    • masklinn 14y ago
      And didn't take delays in account, half a second used to be my ping on dial-up.
  • darxius 14y ago
    I disagree. I think his post accurately gets his point(s) across. He has identified a problem and is obviously fed up, hence the accusatory tone.
  • tyw 14y ago
    perhaps that's the size of the script uncompressed, and gzip crunches it down to < 10KB? dunno for sure. could be the factor of 8 thing that another commenter suggested.
    • jongleberry 14y ago
      Ember is 50kb gzipped
• recoiledsnake 14y ago
  >Ember is very close to the “micro” side of things, but at a “whopping” 49KB (less than a second download on a dial-up internet connection)it’s still far too big for many. Erm, isn't dial up at 56kilobits per second? It will take much longer than a second to download 49KB.
• phpnode 14y ago
  math0ne: your account has been dead for very nearly 5 years, this must be some kind of record.
  • YuriNiyazov 14y ago
    The record might be that he was hellbanned for his very first comment.
• xsace 14y ago
  The web is the only future of software development. It's open, free, innovative, and unpredictable. It didn't pick your Cappuccino, sorry for you, but that's OK for the rest of us.
  • protomyth 14y ago
    Something will come along and replace it when we finally pile too much on something that wasn't designed to do UI in the first place. The questions are "what" and "when" not "if".
    • marknutter 14y ago
      Computers weren't originally designed to play music, video, or games. Yet, here we are.
      • rlpb 14y ago
        That's a false analogy. The original assertion was about the underlying technology being used, not about what they deliver.
      • Avshalom 14y ago
        ... yes well vacuum tubes and weaved wires as memory were replaced weren't they.
• martinced 14y ago
  There's no way yet another webapp framework, no matter how close it emulates the desktop, is going to gain lots of traction when it mandates users to use... Objective-J and JavaScript. Seriously: being on your high horses and all is fine and well but your article is an oversimplification as to how the web works and as to what devs need and want. For example lately I've been very interested in flapjax (FRP UI) and webfui (Clojure / ClojureScript with automated synchronization between the client and the server). Functional programming and FRP UI may be the way forward. I'm not saying it is but I'm saying it may. What does Cappunico have to offer from the standpoint of determinism and reproducibility? Seen from a sufficiently distant paradigm, any web framework is the old, broken, inneficient way of doing things. Even your beloved Cappunico which you wasted so many time on. Cappunico is a failure. It doesn't have to do with you being too intelligent and having figured out things earlier than others. It's just that there are many who devs do not want Objective-C / JavaScript and who want instead something really disruptive. As long as the one really disruptive thing doesn't come along, there shall be competition between lesser solutions (which Cappucino being one) Deal with it.
  • jonsterling 14y ago
    This, so much. Randy's probably right about how silly all the tiny reinventions of UI frameworks are. And, though I'm generally unsympathetic to claims that a project is a failure because people don't want to learn the tools, I think it's safe to say here that asking people to use a language that's only marginally less horrible than JavaScript is not going to be a win from any perspective. But he fails to realize that doing UI in a Cocoa-like framework is totally fucked (to be clear, I do Cocoa touch for a living; I'm speaking from experience). I'd be making an understatement if I said I was unexcited about Cappuccino because it fails to even approach solving any of the truly important problems of UI work, which are (as you hinted) less about "can I make the table scroll quickly" and more about "can I decouple this monstrous mess of data, dependent requests, and presentation". As you note, FRP looks like a step in the right direction toward solving that problem. Traditional Cocoa-like approaches are a step backwards in that area, not forwards.
    • johnbender 14y ago
• Peroni 14y ago
  A couple of years ago a London based start-up came to me asking for help finding a Cappuccino/Objective J developer. I pride myself at being able to find needles in haystacks but finding a dedicated Cappuccino dev in London was proving impossible. During a moment of desperation I fired a very simple email to Randy asking for suggestions and I got a reply within 24 hours with a few names suggested from the Cappuccino community who were UK based and a couple of suggestions on what sort of developer would find the transition to Objective J easier than others. Randy's passion for Cappuccino was blatant and his excitement at seeing the framework expand in the UK was admirable. The fact that someone so passionate has become so frustrated is a shame. Best of luck at Google Randy and thanks for taking time out to help a stranger.
  • danielweber 14y ago
    The fact that the employer needed someone with prior Cappuccino experience is the bigger problem. There are a huge number of frameworks out there. Pick one, and then hire people and have them spend a few days learning it. Adding more and more frameworks leads to, well, relevant XKCD: http://xkcd.com/927/ http://xkcd.com/927/
• wooptoo 14y ago
  Nobody uses Cappuccino because it is written in such an obscure language making the entry barrier too high. While frameworks like AngularJS won because they tried to embrace web technologies instead of replacing them.
• protomyth 14y ago
  I remember a comment by a Smalltalker that pointed out many VMs are actually smaller than some images used on the web.
• moron4hire 14y ago
  This is a big part of why I left Web dev, too. I'm just sick of working with amateurs. When I'm at work, I have things I want to get done. This isn't the classroom, my teammates' lack of comprehension of even things as simple as dependency injection and MVC is their fault, not mine. My productivity and coding power shouldn't have to be hampered just because I'm working with a bunch of code-until-it-works-sorta hacks.
  • marknutter 14y ago
    I'm so relieved to hear that there are no amateur native developers. Gives me a warm, fuzzy feeling inside.
    • freehunter 14y ago
      The point seems to be that the web is cool and hip, which attracts people without computer science backgrounds. Without a solid footing in software design fundamentals, "hack it until it works" seems like a perfectly valid way to run a development cycle. The desktop is not cool or hip, so the people doing it tend to be people who really want to be there, not chasing trends. It's a vast oversimplification of the situation, sure.
      • bmcmahen 14y ago
        I think a fair number of us non-cs-ers end up in web development primarily because html/css is more accessible. I, myself, was more interested in design than coding, and I only learned the basics as a means to creating the designs I wanted. From there you might start learning some JavaScript, you might start learning some frameworks (like Backbone, or ember), and you might get fairly proficient with them... but I don't think the web attracts non cs people because it's "cool" or "hip".
      • gfodor 14y ago
        I don't know about anyone else, but I learned almost nothing about software design when getting my computer science degree.
• kevincennis 14y ago
  Kind of surprised to see that this was posted by Paul Irish, considering he's such a huge web evangelist. There are definitely some valid points in the article, but at the end of the day, it's hard for me to accept that The Right Way™ to do web development is to completely abstract away HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
  • paulirish 14y ago
    Certainly I live and breathe the web and do everything I can to advocate for its success. I helped out Randy with this post because I think this perspective is both legit and underheard. Plenty of folks that work tirelessly to improve the web platform share frustration that many developers for the platform don't take it seriously as an application development platform, don't learn from past mistakes, and don't adopt the lessons learned from other platforms. So honestly I think this painful truth needs to be heard if we expect the web to meet its potential.
    • kevincennis 14y ago
      Thanks for the reply. I was hoping you'd weigh in.
• sc0rb 14y ago
  The disclaimer at the bottom of the page says it all: "(Obviously these opinions are my own and of course do not represent the opinions of my future employer)" He has no real world experience doing anything that matters so just chats about what he's witnessed from within his bubble.
  • sc0rb 14y ago
    In the interest of not being a coward and deleting what I previously said... I just read his 'about me' section and feel a tiny bit humbled..... not massively though.
• SeenItAllBefore 14y ago
  Extremely good points in the article. The front end "developer" community is awash with web designers who know enough jQuery (not Javascript, jQuery) to sprinkle some woo-woo on "websites", but who have no software engineering skills to create genuine rich, immersive applications. And they're resentful because rich, immersive applications that require some engineering power, and some necessarily complex APIs are the way things are going. And these people are noisy and influential. But I think that's changing. We are going to have properly engineered, web mediated rich UIs. Not a mess of cobbled together freeware.
• martinced 14y ago
  I'm sorry about the harsh tone of my other comment (most upvoted comment so far) but the tone of the author is aggressive so... Now on Cappucino's website I read this: "Cappuccino is an open source application framework for developing applications that look and feel like the desktop software users are familiar with." and I can't help but think this is all wrong. There are many (most ?) users who are now familiar with webapps, not desktop apps. And what they want is definitely not a webapp looking like an old, outdated, Windows or Java / Swing app (which is exactly how Cappucino looks like). What many user wants is webapps that look like webapps and if they are "forced" to use a desktop app, then they want a desktop app looking like a webapp (I'm thinking about the client-side desktop apps embedding a browser + JavaScript engine). I'm also pretty sure that devs who have done both advanced HTML + CSS to "customize" the UI of their app do much prefer that over, say, the total and utter madness that Swing is (I'm speaking of what I know). Yes, HTML and CSS have their warts... But you'd have to a masochist to want to create a desktop app using Swing. Users I'm sure they don't want apps that looks like desktop apps: they now have browsers, iPad, Android tablets, etc. They hardly remember what an old Windows desktop app was like. Devs I don't know: I've done my fair share of Swing and the last thing I want is go back doing that. I kinda like this "simple / straight to the point" webapp worlds that we have right now.
  • lucian1900 14y ago
    Swing is a particularly bad example of UI toolkit. Look at things like Qt, Gtk or Cocoa instead.
  • mixmastamyk 14y ago
    Out of curiosity I just looked at the Cappucino website... the controls look modern to me, not like "old, outdated, Windows.. Swing" apps.
• emackn 14y ago
  I feel that the web culture in general is exciting, and often, moving almost too quickly for it's own good. To me, the service companies contribute greatly to the distaste people have for working with the web. Most are churn and burn outfits solely focused on the bottom line, which drive developers away from the web in search of a better fit both career and life wise.
• lolcraft 14y ago
  You know, it would be cool if the text in your webpage took more than an awkward 30% width. And putting it in a bigger font size would be the shit, most definitely. Just saying :) That said, this being butt-hurt about lack of adoption for your pet framework is just fucking overreacting. Yeah, I know, it's your shit, you made it, you're very proud, now it's personal. Bluntly: emulating a recognizable desktop interface in the browser is a shit idea. Your Mac OS emulation on a web browser over my Windows is the web equivalent of James Bond in pajamas. Not to mention that it completely destroys brand identification, and makes legal departments cry. You wrote some cool stuff, it got you some fame and a job at Google. Stop whining.
• commanda 14y ago
  I'm not a web developer, so maybe I just don't understand, but why is it so important to the author that there be wide adoption of Cappuccino? Why does it matter to him that the majority of the web dev community is favoring "micro JS"? Why does he care that other web devs don't want to take a day to learn ObjJ? Why would he leave a path he's so passionate about just because other devs aren't being good software engineers?
• workbench 14y ago
  Wonder where it all went wrong? > Objective-J oh yeah
• aidos 14y ago
  To me this feels a little bit of a stab at the community for not adopting cappuccino but I remember what happened. Several years ago you showed us what it could do. We were impressed, we wanted to play with it but no, we weren't allowed. Instead of opening it up to the community it was kept locked away. By the time it was released (if ever?) we'd moved on. Now we don't care, we have frameworks that are good to work with (like angular). File size has nothing to do with it.
• justinph 14y ago
  Perhaps we've reached the point of too many layers of abstraction. The web is designed for simple hyperlinked documents with some media elements. We've done a pretty good job of adding more stuff to it than that, but that doesn't mean it has proven wise or elegant.
  • visualcsharp 14y ago
    This is precisely why I wrote my .NET routing framework, JuniorRoute (http://projects.nathanalden.com/JuniorRoute http://projects.nathanalden.com/JuniorRoute ). I was tired of cumbersome MVC abstractions (ASP.NET MVC, FubuMVC) that don't fit the nature of HTTP. Some abstraction tends to be necessary, but I believe the MVC architecture is not appropriate for server-side Web development. We need frameworks that get us closer to the metal rather than introducing paradigms that don't fit with the browser/HTTP world we live in.
• Confusion 14y ago
  This reaction to Ember just baffles me. Your day job is to build a piece of web software and you can’t take a few days to learn the ins and outs? What compelling reason can you give me to take a few days to learn Ember and not insert one of a dozen alternatives? Or should I take a few days for each of the dozens of newfangled alternatives that pop up every year? Are a few days even enough when you want to truly experience whether some framework is worth it? Get off my lawn.
• chao- 14y ago
  Many of the author's complaints read similar to this one: Now, people compare Backbone to Cappuccino, or Ember to Rails. Cappuccino, Backbone, and Rails all serve completely different purposes, and saying you don’t need one because you have another is just asinine. Three questions: 1. Who are these people that compare those three frameworks? 2. Why do you let them get under your skin? 3. What does that have you do with you "being done with the web" (or web community)? I don't understand any of these. So some morons want to compare apples and oranges? This has nothing to do with "the web" and crops up in all industries and spheres of life. Welcome to humanity, enjoy your stay. As best I can tell, my lack of empathy must come from a different definition of "web community". When the author complains about how The community has tossed out everything we’ve learned from the last 30 years of building applications in favor of being able to put something together quickly with complete disregard for maintainability or extendability. part of me wants to agree with him, flip a table, and join the melee [1]. But at the same time, I was listening to the Ruby Rogues episode with Sandi Metz last night [2]. There is a 20-minute discussion about utility of does-it-all frameworks, their use in a project, the types of projects you use them for, and the point at which all projects will necessarily need to have designed a better solution, or massively adapted the framework, to better fit their problem. It's all very clear-eyed and up front about this exact tradeoff (that is, complaint by the author). That is but one example, and I won't belabor the thread with more. At the end of the day, either the author is simply frustrated that it was hard to convince people to use his project/product, or we must live in very different "web communities". [1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=WpkDN78P884&t=33m0s http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=W... [2] http://rubyrogues.com/087-rr-book-clubpractical-object-oriented-design-in-ruby-with-sandi-metz/ http://rubyrogues.com/087-rr-book-clubpractical-object-orien...
• jentulman 14y ago
  It's a shame to see someone who has been so passionate for a product reach this level of frustration but it feels like there's a lot of blaming 'everything that's wrong with the industry' for lack of uptake. If no-one is taking up on your offering, no matter how cool it is, then you need to look at what you can do to entice people in that you aren't already. I've been back to look at cappuccino since the 280-slides first went up, and the get people hooked documentation has always been severely lacking (which is the case with a lot of projects, but it makes some of the complaints about peoples efforts to learn stick out Their docs have long had, to my mind, a tone of "it's just like objective-c, which is easy, so learn some of that and you'll be fine" [1] It does have pretty complete API docs, but they're not a lot of use without much deeper examples given than the few they have on the site. When it comes to having thrown out years of software engineering know-how I think there's possibly something to that, and it is currently being picked up on in more recent frameworks but perhaps, as is being highlighted by things like backbone and angular, trying to shoe-horn dogmatic desktop software patterns like MVC into building apps for a relatively young platform like the browser is only a organisational stop-gap on the way to better, more suitable patterns that are still to come. [1] http://www.cappuccino-project.org/learn/objective-j.html http://www.cappuccino-project.org/learn/objective-j.html
• bhurlow 14y ago
  Lets think about this from the opposite direction: Which projects on the web are the MOST successful? Facebook? Twitter? Gmail? Github? Do ANY of those giants use big, all-encompassing super libraries? NOPE
  • lucian1900 14y ago
    At least Gmail does, perhaps Facebook as well by now.
• DonnyV 14y ago
  It never even reached version 1.0.0 https://github.com/cappuccino/cappuccino/commits/v0.9.6 https://github.com/cappuccino/cappuccino/commits/v0.9.6
• asciimo 14y ago
  This is not a good first impression for someone who had never heard of Cappuccino before. It reads like a verbose rage quit. It would have been more respectful to his colleagues and their (small?) community of users to explain his career decision while also remaining optimistic about the project.
• 6ren 14y ago
  > The community has tossed out everything we’ve learned from the last 30 years > of building applications in favor of being able to put something together > quickly with complete disregard for maintainability or extendability. I wonder, heretically, if maintainability/extendability is less important today... in the past, you'd build something, and then need to maintain it for years or decades. But today, if the pace of change really has accelerated that much, perhaps things change so much that it is easier to rebuild from scratch each time (instead of maintaining/extending) - even if you did carefully design it. Is is just a small but prominent group doing web development (especially with ruby on and back-end and a front-end focus)? Is it just that we're still seeing industries adopt to the web, and old approaches slowly dying (i.e. in the midst of revolutionary times)? Or is this a permenant acceleration, that will only increase?
• RutZap 14y ago
  Done with the web, moving to Google to work on Google Now; an app that relies heavily on web services to provide information to users... I don't know why but I don't see that as being done with the web. I see it as changing jobs/projects, but still within the web community. And also I don't agree with: Meanwhile, the web community will continue to solve the same non-problems over and over again. The web community is larger than the people referred to within the article and I don't think it's OK to generalize like that. In the last 5 years the web has evolved massively and I don't agree with the fact that we are solving the same non-problems. Progress and innovation is out there, on the web, within the web... you just have to look from a different point of view (and occasionally sift through the BS).
• Kiro 14y ago
  Yet we conveniently forget that loading just a few images will quickly surpass that 49K of code. It's not about loading time, it's about bloat. This reaction to Ember just baffles me. Your day job is to build a piece of web software and you can’t take a few days to learn the ins and outs? Sure but when there are alternatives which you can jump into right away with the same good results, why waste two days?
  • STRML 14y ago
    Exactly. The web is a very agile place. We don't all sit in cubicles and have weekly meetings. Some people just want to get things done, quickly.
• felxh 14y ago
  Web apps != desktop apps, at least not for now. When I looked Cappuccino a while back, I was impressed by what it could do inside a browser in terms of GUIs. However, when I researched a bit how I could use Cappuccino to solve the problems I was having at the time, I quickly got stuck. A common use case for web apps is to allow for collaboration and/or sharing (e.g. Basecamp, Github....). When you look at the tutorials for Cappuccino you can quickly find out how to make an image editing app, but if you want to find out how to do even basic stuff (for web apps) like saving data to a backend, you have to search really hard. In addition to that, Cappuccino always looked somewhat immature - even now the home page is somewhat broken. You don't want to bet on a new framework AND a completely new language when it looks immature.
• STRML 14y ago
  Personally, batteries-included frameworks like Cappuccino scare me off for a few reasons: 1. I have to learn Objective-J. I've been web programming for years and I've become really good at Javascript. I even enjoy it. Other frameworks don't require learning a new language. 2. Time spent learning Cappuccino is only good for programming Cappuccino apps. Time spent in micro frameworks generally translates to other frameworks. Backbone is so bare-metal that it is very easy for Javascript programmer to feel comfortable. 3. Batteries-included frameworks often have "their" way of doing things that are not extensible. This can lead to awkward situations where you need behavior that is just not possible without monkey-patching the hell out of the frameworks and getting yourself stuck on a particular version. 4. I can't speak to Cappuccino, but a similar framework, ExtJS, has (for 4 major versions and nearly 10 years) lacked a build and minification system that didn't suck. This means you must include all dependencies, leading to 1.2MB+(minified!) blobs of JS that can take upwards of 10 seconds or more to load even on fast connections. For business-class apps running on B2B contracts, that might be fine. For public-facing webapps, this is murder. 5. People like micro frameworks because they can use every brand new & shiny piece of JS that shows up on the web without worrying about compatibility. And they can use {HTML5 feature} without worrying about compatibility. I'm sure Cappuccino does a better job than most when it comes to this sort of thing, but what happens when the devs lose interest? Years of "Objective-J" experience go to waste.
  • randomdata 14y ago
    > I have to learn Objective-J. Objective-J is a Javascript superset, so everything you know about Javascript is still available to you. It will take minutes to learn the additions. The language is not really the problem. Its the framework that will take quite some time to learn. There are a ton of interfaces to work with. I suspect that is why you feel more comfortable with something like Backbone, because it basically brings nothing to the table, so there is very little to learn. > Time spent learning Cappuccino is only good for programming Cappuccino apps. Not exactly. The API is nearly identical to Cocoa on the Mac, and very similar to Cocoa Touch on iOS. If you know any of the three, you should be able to transition between the frameworks without much trouble. You can even use Apple's own Interface Builder to build your Cappuccino interfaces, to give you some idea of how similar they really are. There is also GNUStep, but that's probably not a big selling point, granted. Perhaps the time spent is less valuable if you have no interaction with Apple devices, but I suspect a lot of people interested in web development also have an interest in mobile development where knowing how to develop for iOS does have quite a bit of value.
• nkuttler 14y ago
  I had a quick look and cappuccino apps are not crawlable, at least the demos aren't. Sorry, but it doesn't look like cappuccino gets what the web is about. As somebody who uses text interfaces primarily I don't think desktop apps are amazing anyway, even if I see that they are better for some tasks. The web browser is the only graphical tool I use daily, I don't need things inside to look like desktop apps. shudder
  • paranoiacblack 14y ago
    Yeah, this was my reaction as well. I'm kind of surprise someone has fondness for Desktop Apps anymore, because I only have one and it's my web browser so I do development and get other work done. Other than that it's terminal based running non-gui applications. Desktop doesn't really have a place on the web from where I'm sitting.
    • mikecsh 14y ago
      I don't think either of you are representative of the vast majority of computer users.
• deepuj 14y ago
  The end objective of web development is to bring desktop like experience? I wouldn't blame the failure of Cappuccino on the emergence of micro libraries. Cappuccino simply does not sound like what the web needs.
• biznickman 14y ago
  This has to be one of the most bitter and condescending posts ever. Rather than sucking up the fact that a project he has been putting his heart and soul for some reason isn't gaining traction (and trying to adjust so that it can), he blames "the web community" for all his issues. The community doesn't have a centralized decision making system, instead, people support things that make sense. In this case, they didn't support Cappuccino, because it didn't make sense to them. Rather than blaming themselves though, they blame the masses. The conclusion "screw you all, I'm joining Google" is really abrasive and arrogant. It would have been much better if this post was phrased as: for some reason our platform didn't work, here's what we learned.
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• edman 14y ago
  I think that this guy does not really understand how the web works. I mean, emulating desktop on the web has been tried many times and failed each time. He's right about some things (like people considering 49KB to be a lot) though.
• fusiongyro 14y ago
  While I agree with the main thrust of the article, in my opinion what killed Cappuccino was that it was big, weird, and rather opaque. Did it ever occur to you that maybe it was just too much? One thing I liked about jQuery was that my webpages didn't have to become applications, they could just be webpages with behavior. It worked within the paradigm, you might say, and that's what I wanted and it's what my clients wanted too. SproutCore didn't see heavy adoption either. GWT probably had more than both, but it wasn't the #1 or #2 Java framework. I wanted to love Cappuccino, but I didn't know Cocoa or Objective-C. Your team was spread so thin I remember wondering--how much time are they putting into Objective-J, how much into Cappuccino, how much into 280 Slides? When 280 Slides shut down, it looked to me (as an outsider) as the beginning of the inevitable cascade of plug-pulling that happens when a small team realizes they bit off more than they can chew. Imagine what it would have done to Rails adoption if Basecamp had been shut down. It was the flagship product. It's hard to imagine jQuery being shut down, but suppose it did. With Zepto and everything else, it wouldn't be the end of the world for me--my investment in it is safe. Imagine if I had written tens of thousands of lines of Objective-J. Does this blog post make me feel like I made a safe investment? We like light libraries over massive frameworks because light libraries really can't take our applications down with them. You may have brought an impressive engineering mindset to this problem, and this is a problem that deserves it, but we're still talking about 4 years from start to finish. If you want me to go "all in" on something that could take years of my work down in a ball of flame, forgive me if I'm distrustful of three kids doing a startup and trying to reinvent the world.
  • anonfunction 14y ago
    This was the comment I wanted to write.
• iwanttoprogram 14y ago
  I love this guy.
• hpguy 14y ago
  Why would I prefer to plug and play (and toss away) micro, modular libraries/frameworks designed to interop or to be independently used instead of using a monolithic technology that pushes to my throat ObjJ, Cocoa and a other contraints that follow (like IE8+ only)? That needs an explanation?
  • wilmoore 14y ago
    Awww, bless his heart. He forgot to add the #notsohumblebrag tag to his post.
• danielweber 14y ago
  Your day job is to build a piece of web software and you can’t take a few days to learn the ins and outs? Do you know how many frameworks people are pushing out there? It's a mountain. And everyone thinks the secret to success is to be behind the latest greatest framework. Which the world doesn't need. I know why they do it: because being behind a framework is an excellent point on the resume and will help you find employment, and so many employers really suck at evaluating people. But in the wake are a whole bunch of frameworks that some other employer is going to say "oh, you don't know CaffeineInjecterrr? Sorry, we need someone with 2 years of experience with it." One reason founders complain that older people don't seem to know about the latest framework is that we've seen dozens of these things come and go like flashes in the pan. I'm sorry if this comes off as a rant against this guy's framework.
• norswap 14y ago
  My on topic, but only slightly, comment is that there is too much of an emphasis on framework these days. Why not libraries I can call at my discretion? It is me who is master of the code, and not the reverse.
• undoware 14y ago
  The mistake made here is the assumption that we know what the web is evolving towards: (ostensibly) something like the desktop. Hence the eagerness to do it all again but on the web this time. (Isn't that the essence of Cappuccino?) It would be absurd even if mobile hadn't happened. So why are we clinging to the same default assumptions? Think again.
• peterwwillis 14y ago
  I'm done with people making a big deal about new technology when old technology does the job better. People like this guy are spending their lives trying to figure out how to replace perfectly good native applications with ones that live inside web browsers. It's depressing.
• nhebb 14y ago
  I tried the Aristo showcase (http://www.cappuccino-project.org/aristo/showcase/ http://www.cappuccino-project.org/aristo/showcase/), and it took 20 seconds to load on high speed internet connection w/ Chrome browser. I can understand developers' reluctance to use such a framework. If you've marketing a web app developed with Cappuccino, you're going to lose a lot of conversions with that kind of wait.
  • mattmanser 14y ago
    It's an app, I have to wait to download apps. In fact I often have to wait for Gmail to download too. They're just not framing the conversation well with the default loading screen. If it said something like 'this will only take a while once', it wouldn't be so bad! I'm not sure this is a good objection.
  • paranoiacblack 14y ago
    Is this really written in Cappuccino? I get some crazy graphical glitches when I click any of the buttons or dropdowns on that page. I hope this isn't the quality they were talking about, but I will admit that looks like it belongs in a Desktop app.
  • drbawb 14y ago
    40 seconds on my MacBook Pro. Most of the time was spent downloading "AppKit.sj" which is ~2.6MiB, though, and my internet is pretty slow.
  • spyder 14y ago
    It loads in 5 seconds for me but the interface has many bugs and fails to implement many behaviors of native elements: scrolling with mouse wheel doesn't work, using the elements with keyboard is impossible because it seems many of them doesn't even have a focused state. When trying to focus on elements with the Tab key it's messing up the whole scrollview because after that elements aren't working even with the mouse. Pressing the Enter key redirects to another page. So it's a pretty bad showcase and the other demos too have the same issues. (using Firefox on Windows)
• shaunxcode 14y ago
  I fail to see how the initiative to create decoupled components is a failure to grok "real" programming. If anything has come close to the code sharing vision of smalltalk (mentioned because objective-j is the strange cousin of objective-c, which is the step brother of smalltalk) it is the component approach.
• csomar 14y ago
  So here is my humble opinion: I discovered Capuccino two years ago. My first reaction was "This is amazing!". I need to learn another language, framework and stuff. But I thought that's the price I pay. There were three things that pulled me off, though. 1. It's buggy (or was buggy). I don't remember the details, but I couldn't setup few things because of bugs and the community was not there to help. 2. It's SLOW. Unless things changed now, I tried a few examples and I can't see how it can work. This was a huge turn-off. 3. I'll massively depend on it. jQuery is broke? Replace it with another library. This xxx.js library sucks? We can use another one. When using Capuccino you are locked to their framework. Is there a bug pulling you off from shipping? You are now screwed. So my humble opinion is that Capuccino was not successful, at least by the time I tried it. The founder leaving the project is another reason why no one should have used it.
  • bunkat 14y ago
    It was number 2 that just turned me off right now. Went to look at some of their demo apps and was met with a loading screen for 10 seconds before anything happened. Not sure about everyone else, but I know my users are not going to stick around long enough to even see the app.
    • pooriaazimi 14y ago
      I have a slow machine for now (2009 MBP), and Cappuccino is dog slow on it. I'd try it again in a heartbeat once I get a faster machine, but for now, it's literally (and I'm using that word right) unusable. A 30+ second delay after I save a simple interface in Xcode and the changes compiling. It's just frustrating. But if the turnaround time was less than a second, I think I would love to use something as "well-thought-out" as Cappuccino.
• thiagoperes 14y ago
  I really liked Cappuccino. Great features and 280 Slides was/is awesome. I follow its development for quite a long time. Why didn't I use it? - As a complete noob, I found it hard to start (despite having good objc knowledge) - I checked the objj github language page, and didn't saw a lot of activity - Last but not least, Atlas, a Cappuccino IDE was supposed to be released. I tried contacting Tolmasky about where the language & IDE were headed but never got a response.
  • mjmsmith 14y ago
    "Never got s response" was pretty much the story of what happened to the (not free) Atlas beta. I suspect a certain number of people were just turned off by the way that was handled. (Yes, I realize that Cappuccino is a separate project.)
    • boucher 14y ago
      Yeah, I'm sorry about the way it played out too. Unfortunately, a lot of that was out of our hands.
      • thiagoperes 14y ago
        Just curious, what happened? I still think Atlas is key to developing in Cappuccino, unless you find another way to autocomplete ObjJ code efficiently. Cocoa and ObjC only works because XCode does a lot of the heavy lifting for you.
• kmfrk 14y ago
  Something else I wonder about is what this increasing focus on JS is doing to accessibility. Many sites won't even render with JS turned off; the no-JS version of them are only optimized for search robots - not human beings who rely on accessibility tools! Is it just me, or is this so-called development moving us farther away from good accessibility instead of closer?
  • adamnemecek 14y ago
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WAI-ARIA http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WAI-ARIA I'd lie if I said that I'm in a position to evaluate it's merits but it's there.
• laumars 14y ago
  > The hilarious obsession with file size is the start of my frustrations with the web community. It's not so hilarious if you're the one paying for bandwidth when hundreds of thousands of users are accessing your SSL site each day. Or if you're desperately trying to pull one page up quickly while on your smart phone in a region with sketchy (at best) mobile reception. I'm one of those people who are obsessed with keeping file sizes to a minimum and, quite frankly, I find it "hilarious" when developers create sites with both a heavy bandwidth footprint and heavy CPU footprint rendering the bloody thing just because they insist users should experience a full desktop experience inside a web page. Those are different paradigms with different limitations and bottlenecks. Trying to shoehorn in a desktop paradigm (regardless of how elegant the OP might have considered Cappuccino's code) for the web simply didn't make sense back then; and that is why his project failed. I also want to stress that I'm not against interactive sites. Obviously there is a happy medium between minimal design and the OP's vision of the web. However there have been studies that have proven that even a fraction of a second longer page load time can drive business away from your site. And given this and my former points, it makes considerable more sense to use more compact libraries to begin with. Lastly, his point about many developers being unwilling to spend a little time learning web frameworks is something that I haven't personally encountered. But I can agree with his frustration on that specific remark if it is true.
  • danielweber 14y ago
    "What do you mean the page takes a long time to render? Look at one of my monitors, it comes up in less than a second! Yes, everyone has a 6 fucking-hertz video card with 8 gigasnots of memory these days. Well, all my friends do."
  • d4nt 14y ago
    Yes, the relationship between page load speed and bounce rate is well proven: http://blog.kissmetrics.com/loading-time/?wide=1 http://blog.kissmetrics.com/loading-time/?wide=1
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• jacquesc 14y ago
  I share his frustration with the JS community. There is a rampant wave of a sort of "Ludditism" where people fight tooth and nail against innovations trying to make things better. The argument always comes down to "what we have is good enough, and OMG file size!!!". I'm a bit more optimistic though. Randy and the Cappucino team blazed a new trail, and although he burnt out there are others who are continuing on and reinventing client side dev. Backbone was just a start. Ember, Angular, CoffeeScript, tons of other great tools/libraries are advancing things at a now exponential pace. Thankfully there are plenty of other early adopters willing to wade through the early buggy code to build projects on top of them.
• ajkjk 14y ago
  "This reaction to Ember just baffles me. Your day job is to build a piece of web software and you can’t take a few days to learn the ins and outs? Presumably you’re in a large team because this project is important and will take some time to complete. " What the hell is this!? Your day job is to write software, perhaps, but you're going to come across Ember/X new web framework/whatever in your free time first. You're going to try it because you've seen the name floating around and it sounded cool. And - discover that it's impenetrable. That it acts like it wasn't designed for people to learn. That it starts frustrating and stays that way, when you were looking for a fun new project that moves fast and get results. Why would you keep going? Why would you give it time and then force your teammates to do the same thing, when the developer couldn't be bothered to make their software accessible? Why is it worth your time, as a human, to waste effort because someone who wants you to use their software couldn't be troubled to really try? I don't understand what people are thinking when they create a brilliant, complex piece of software, and don't dedicate concerted effort to making it the easiest thing to learn ever. So - you want people to use your product, but only if the have to suffer? Or - you and your team have talked and decided you want some users, but, you know, definitely not too many, so you make it take a high activation energy to get started. Software lives and dies by its barrier to entry and documentation. And far too many projects have far too little of both these days. *I understand Ember is improving, especially after that post. Good! I haven't actually used it; I'm just going off what I read the other day.
• cromwellian 14y ago
  As one of the people who worked on GWT, and have used other more structured frameworks (Dart, Closure), I have a strong affinity for systems with good tooling support, a consistent package management and module system, etc However, I think what's missing is a recognition that there are different kinds of web apps. There are "application" oriented apps, primarily single page, large, and not content driven (gmail, docs, games, etc), and then there are page-oriented apps, like forums, content management systems, blogs, database backed forms/reports, etc. The former lend them selves really well to the structured approach. You trade off simplicity and iteration speed for more of a "on rails" experience, but it helps for larger teams to collaborate on larger projects to have some restrictions on freedom and some mutually agreed upon consistent behaviors. However, the latter page-oriented apps fit in a lot better with these microframeworks. And page oriented apps fit in with the original vision of the Web, they are documents, they have URL addressable, RESTful, hopefully, durable content, indexable by search engines, and linkable by anyone. I think there is room for both and a sweet spot for different approaches. I often use several languages for specially suited purposes, like sed/awk/Perl for text processing, JS for small page oriented stuff or mocks, GWT for larger apps. I would not advocate GWT for people for building progressively enhanced page-oriented apps, even though I'm the author of GwtQuery and AngularGWT. Using the right tool for the job often depends on context and personal preference. A lone hacker or small team can get by with doing a large app in hand coded JS with hand rolled build tools and module systems, but frustrate other people coming onto the project. There is too much, IMHO, "one above all" thinking when it comes to development, and often, the original goals -- what the app is supposed to do for the end user, get lost in the zeal to build a cool framework or infrastructure for it.
• dave_sid 14y ago
  see you later
• at-fates-hands 14y ago
  It seems like the author has been out of the workforce for several years, came back and realized this wasn't how things were when he left and now he's pissed. The rate at which technology moves, you can't have any kind of framework that requires huge overhead, no matter how good it is. If people can't pick up and start building stuff with it right away, it's not going to gain traction. Add in decision makers don't allow you to just take a week to learn a framework you think will be awesome for a project you might be working on soon. Time is still money and nobody has the time or patience to learn something which has a high overhead. While I agree this sucks, it's just the way the industry works these days. I do believe there will be a cost to this somewhere down the road, and the collective pendulum will swing back to how the author prefers it.
• cromwellian 14y ago
  The biggest problem with Web Development today, IMHO, and the biggest reason why people desire Widget frameworks in the first place, is that the modern browser rendering pipeline is too complex for most people to understand. If you want to create an app which can consistently animate or scroll at 60fps, avoid jank, and random hiccups, and do cross-platform between WebKit, Firefox, and IE9/10, you will find it enormously painful. And often, a solution for one particular UI design won't compose cleanly with others. How many developers use the Chrome DevTools timeline, and minimize the time spend computing layout and the amount of repaints? How many of them arrange for optimal use of the Compositor? This is one of the challenges in Web developer vs iOS or Android, where the UI performance is more predictable with fewer surprises. Hence, the desire for a Web framework with Widgets that is "idiot proof" when it comes to high performance. This rubs some people the wrong way because you lose flexibility to control the look and feel in many cases and must settle for building with out-of-the-box stuff, but the productivity benefits are undeniable.
  • zoul 14y ago
    The biggest problem with Web Development today, IMHO, and the biggest reason why people desire Widget frameworks in the first place, is that the modern browser rendering pipeline is too complex for most people to understand. It’s a huge mistake to consider Cappuccino a “widget framework”. Cappuccino’s main point is providing the whole “web development stack”. You don’t have to care about browser differences, about DOM trees, about HTML. You just write against a sane, modern, high-level API, just as you would on a modern desktop platform. The number of things to keep in your head dramatically decreases. That’s the point.
    • cromwellian 14y ago
      I understand how Cappuccino works (I am one of the GWT authors, and I often have to tell people the same about GWT, is it not a "widget framework"), but what I'm saying is, from what I observe, people often spend more time debugging CSS and HTML than they do code. There are lots of reasons why JS needs fixing, I'm onboard with that. But honestly, you could fix it 100%, and it would still be easier to develop native apps on iOS/Android. 280 North's Slides for example as a great example of what you could do, but let's not kid ourselves, it was also pretty slow. If you look at the herculean efforts the Google Docs team went through to get that running fast, and it's still not fast enough, I'd say there's there a lot more work do be done on the Web-as-app-UI-renderer model side. If it weren't for all of the other things you'd have to reinvent, and what you'd lose from indexability and transparency, I'd almost say built a framework on using WebGL rendering.
• ahoge 14y ago
  > Ember [being 49kB in size is] still far too big for many. Yet we conveniently forget that loading just a few images will quickly surpass that 49K of code. 50kB of compressed and minified JS aren't the same as a 50kB JPEG. The JS must be parsed and compiled which is a far heavier operation than decoding an image. The last time I looked, it took about 100msec to parse and compile 100kB of minified and gzipped JavaScript on a desktop. However, after all of this you still won't get the full speed. It needs to run for a bit and then the hot parts of the code will be replaced with more optimized code. Again, this takes some precious resources. An image, on the other hand, is decoded within a few msecs and that's the end of that. Size is just one metric. It won't tell you the whole story.
• Irregardless 14y ago
  > Google Now is one of the most exciting pieces of technology I’ve seen in a long time. It’s solving problems that couldn’t be solved four years ago. Showing people sports scores and traffic reports before they ask for them? Well, at least that gives us an accurate picture of your perspective (or lack thereof). The Galaxy Nexus is the best phone I've ever used or owned, but I couldn't possibly care less about Now. It's usually known as "that annoying thing that keeps popping up in my notification bar". Everyone in the IT industry understands the frustration of trying to help people who are unwilling to change and insist on repeating history. Most of us don't give up quite as easily though...
  • pablasso 14y ago
    That's shortsighted, this is what Google Now, can do.. well, right now. But in the future it will be extended to make your life easier, i.e tell you when you get close to a cinema that is displaying a movie of a director that you like, telling you that this near theater is performing a show that you really liked 2 years ago, etc.
    • taeric 14y ago
      These are not exactly stellar examples. The ones that I've seen that are good are: * Let you know that meeting you have will be tough to make it to due to traffic/you haven't left yet. * ... Ok, so there is really only one good use case I know of. The others are items that, if I am not searching for it, I don't think I really want to know about it. So, can you give some good expansions of that etc?
  • wting 14y ago
    Your (lack of) use of Google Now is unrelated to the difficulty of the problem. Predictive analytics is an interesting engineering challenge, and is probably what appeals to the author. On the other hand, re-solving the same web problems repeatedly is not.
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• jwkellyiii 14y ago
  Giant d-bag post. Not going to rehash the technical side, it has already been stated. I am going to jump on this: "This trend really favors front end web developers, who tend to not have a software engineering background." That is an egotistical, asinine comment. ANyone that thinks that has no clue. Wake up. I have a computer science degree with 10+ years of development experience. So fuck you man. I prefer front-end development as do thousands of others with the same background. That doesn't make me less of a dev than you. Get off your high horse.
• Zelphyr 14y ago
  If the goal of "micro JS" truly is file size then yes, that's focusing on the wrong problem. To me the idea behind it is to have a bunch of little tools that do one thing really well. When those tools are combined you have something very powerful, flexible, testable, and reasonably decoupled. Not perfect. Nothing ever is. But better than having to use a massive framework and do everything the framework way in which case you're just working for the framework rather than it working for you. In my experience that is ALWAYS the case with a framework. Put another way, Unix has been so popular for so long in part because it prefers the "a set of tools that do only one thing but do it really well" philosophy over a framework.
• tixocloud 14y ago
  This feels like a classic case of great product but poor marketing. The learning curve is a critical piece to adoption rates. When developers shun the framework, it's probably because it does not provide sufficient visible benefit for them to warrant going through the troubles of learning the framework. Once everyone gets onboard with jQuery, it's going to be hard to get people to switch over no matter how great Cappuccino simply because those people do not see the benefits outweighing the costs of switching. It's also a chicken and egg problem. I'm going to go on a hunch and say there are way more developers who know jQuery than ones who know Cappuccino. Naturally, people would prefer using jQuery because it's easier to get someone else on board for projects. I really loved the look and feel of Cappuccino and kudos to you for a tremendous effort! Unfortunately, I did not choose to use the framework precisely because I had to learn something called Objective J and for that, I'm sorry that I am part of the group of people who felt that the learning curve was abit steep.
• perlgeek 14y ago
  tl;dr: Cappuccino is great, but the big crowd of frontend developers doesn't appreciate it, and insists on reinventing the wheels badly. That's why Randy is done with the web. Randy, if you happen to read this: ignore the nay-sayers. There will never been a universal agreement on what the best technology is to get a job done. And there will always be people who try to troll your approach. That doesn't devalue your approach. Just build cool stuff with it, and be happy.
• ebryn 14y ago
  I just want to point out that Randy is advocating for the use of Cappuccino. Many people seem to be thinking that is the point. It's not.
• ebryn 14y ago
  I just want to point out that Randy is NOT advocating for the use of Cappuccino. Many people seem to be thinking that is the point. It's not.
• kyledrake 14y ago
  He's going to work on Google Now, which is (more or less) the same thing I was working on with my previous employer. I could complain about how they are making a worse version of what we did, but I'm not going to do that. I'm just glad people are starting to see the usefulness of location-based development. You may want to consider it from that perspective. People are getting interested in client-side frameworks. You laid important groundwork for that. Why not be happy about that? There will always be a cycle of change in software development. Trust me, you will not find that this pattern changes switching from front-end JS work to backend "native" programming work. The only constant in this world is constant change. If I was not satisfied with that, I would be into something like architectural engineering. When you build a bridge over a river, it lasts for hundreds of years. That said, I like a lot of the points in the article. I too have noted the absurdity of people complaining about how a 49kb file is "too large". I share the profound confusion of the hyper-simplicity movement, where we trade ~30kb of code for our ability to maintain software, which is a much bigger problem than performance in our industry today.
• artagnon 14y ago
  Objective-J and this insane Cocoa worship? Are you serious? Try to understand that the desktop and web are two completely different things. I would not want a UI that's designed ground-up for the desktop on my web browser. It's just wrong. I haven't seen Cappuccino myself (I mean, who has?), but stuff like GWT is just broken. HTML/ CSS/ JS exist for a reason: they're simple, elegant, and products of many years of evolution. Sure, there are cross-browser problems, but we're getting tools to deal with them. Evolution doesn't happen by throwing away existing implementations out of the window, and starting with a fresh slate. Tiny incremental changes that preserve (atleast partially) backward compatibility always win. That is how software engineering (and engineering, in general) works. Sure, there are a lot of incompetent programmers with the span of a housefly in the world, and a lot of "web people" are people- what does this "general truth" have to do with anything? More importantly, why does it annoy you?
• NikolaTesla 14y ago
  I feel as though everyone is leaving out a huge part of why the web has won. For the most part it's free. The world developed muscle memory that 'installed' cost money and web access was free. Not the only reason it won but a big one.
• leephillips 14y ago
  I wrote this a little over a year ago: http://lee-phillips.org/cappuccino/ http://lee-phillips.org/cappuccino/ Maybe not very kind, but just maybe people didn't rush to use this thing because they didn't inspire much confidence.
• orasis 14y ago
  So the author failed and isn't good at empathizing with people...
• porker 14y ago
  Earlier today I was talking to another dev, and we were both wishing for a system like Delphi 7 for the web, with vcl and a vibrant ecosystem of 3rd party components (we were discussing how much SaaS leads to reinventing the wheel). After 12 years in web dev, I feel his pain.
• camus 14y ago
  Objective-J is not the problem itself , the problem is that Cappucino is very hard to debug in the browser itself. I went through the tutorial , had an error , and there was no way i could know where it came from. I dont have a mac right now so i cant use the builder , but i dont think that Cappucino failed because it is bloated. I use Haxe which is even more bloated than Cappucino. Yet Haxe allows me to debug a JS app directly in the browser with source maps , Haxe has a very smart and powerfull compiler. Maybe it is matter of timing. But i think it is just a matter of tools. Again Obj-J is not horrible to work with. And Capp apps are definetly neat.
• lucian303 14y ago
  It's not Javascript. That's why it failed. That's plainly obvious. As far as code size and front end developers, yeah it's sad. The "must be built here" mantra is in full effect, usually because the developers cannot read code, JS is their only language and they do not understand code reuse nor do they understand many issues which libraries like jQuery, backbone, etc. solve for them. The penchant for Coffeescript describes the state of front end development right now. Instead of solving new problems, a giant part of the community is creating new problems.
• bsimpson 14y ago
  And, I've officially been called out in a blog post. When I was considering SproutCore/Ember, I was the most senior person on a severely understaffed team at an ad company where turnaround time was measured in days, not months. A couple of days of research was definitely considered expensive, time-wise, in that environment. I like the idea of continuously striving to better yourself, and I'll probably try Ember on a personal project to that end. However, adopting a new technology comes at a cost, and my team couldn't afford to spend what could easily have amounted to man-months of time relearning how to do things on the promise that we might be more productive in the future.
• namuol 14y ago
  So because I didn't embrace your framework due to its use of an unproven, unfamiliar language, you're going to hold your talents ransom from me? Maybe I made the right choice in not depending on Cappuccino in the first place... Who ever said the web is the forefront of game-changing technology these days? It's just a platform that's fast to iterate on; that's why I like it, anyway. Don't pigeonhole every web developer out there into some shitty imaginary stereotype you have just because most of us didn't use your framework.
• saiprashanth93 14y ago
  I am not a developer.Can anyone tell me why so many frameworks are being created?There seems to be five or six frameworks in each language,new languages being adopted to create frameworks.Why all this work?
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• scotty79 14y ago
  All this careful superior engineering and all the sophisticated desktop UX libs and I can't name one desktop app that is nice to use (except SketchUp but that's thanks to innovative 3D tools not the UX which is ugly). While many webapps written with crap tech thats only advantage is fairly flat learning curve look marvelous, responsive and are perfect in what they do.
• grooper 14y ago
  you are done with the web community because its developers cant take the time to learn something difficult: the web has produced as gateway to see programming work with little code. This will produce creators that do not have very much in depth experience/desire for hard problems. It also allows projects to ramp up and see results really fast. This is the trade off of the web ... deal with it or get out. You can be a teacher to these noobs or a nah sayer ... seems you picked the latter. It sounds like you are surrounding yourself with poor programmers. Google Now is not a framework its a product. Im sure youll be working with some web guys soon that will be implementing the web version of the product. Dont be surprised if they dont use the best tool ... things need to get done ... the most precious resource is time ... other things can be wasted before we let that one go.
• haydenj0nes 14y ago
  god DAMN, this is just about the most pretentious thing I've ever read. My face is making involuntary expressions of disbelief as I read more and more.
• mgkimsal 14y ago
  "Almost every decent developer I know has no problem spending a weekend learning some new and cool tool, but sadly, this spirit seems to be absent from the web culture." Hrm... the majority of web developers I know are constantly trying new tech, but they aren't just limited to front-end js. They're learning JS frameworks - trying out knockout, angular, yuk, dojo, jquery, ember, handlebars, mootools, extjs, gwt, qooxdoo, zk, and more. Plus they're learning about and using server-side caching, security, performance, server admin, graphic design, version control, search technologies, mobile development, database work, in addition to any language-specific stuff they're dealing with on a day to day basis. I'm sort of sick of this attitude of "if you can't spend 2 days learning X, you're not a real developer". Or, more precisely, "web developers" don't do this stuff. I'll tell you what - if I spent 2 days on your latest framework, then asked questions about 'how do I do XYZ?', I'm more likely to get told off by self-appointed kingmakers that I'm not worthy of using your framework because I don't have the capacity to think at your level, or I'm not willing to commit enough time to learn it, or whatever. So..., as they say in England, get stuffed.
• porker 14y ago
  I'm with the OP on the 100's of badly implemented, slightly-sucky UI components. Cappucino did this brilliantly... but it was a too big paradigm shift. Give me a beautiful UI library written with elegant and performant JS behind the scenes, but let me implement stuff in a non-desktop way using standard web technologies. I like the concept of GWT, but Cappucino fell into the ExtJS/Sencha category for me - trying to reinvent the web using web technology.
• Me1000 14y ago
  Author here: First off, thank you all for the comments! Also, thank you Paul for posting this and helping me articulate my thoughts while writing it! Finally, thank you to everyone who has wished me success in my future endeavors. Although I expected this post would step on some toes and anger several people (although I tried my best not to), I'm happily surprised by the reaction in general. HN tends towards the negative, by the Twitter feedback has sparked some great discussion. I can't respond to each thread, but I'd like to take a moment to address some misunderstandings about the post. First off, I'm not trying to sell you on Cappuccino. The project as just as strong as it has ever been and the people doing the day to day work are very dedicated. I'm also not upset that Cappuccino wasn't a massive success or that it didn't dominate the world. The use of Cappuccino in my post was purely to illustrate my point of view. We built some great software, and I'm really proud of that. The post is more about the stagnation of the community as a whole. It's very difficult to write this kind of post without sounding defensive or like I'm bitter because my projects weren't massively successful. I tried my best, but ultimately you read the result. The tone of the post should read more as disappointment rather than anger. I'm disappointed in what hasn't been accomplished in the last 3 years. Many of you saw how great 280 Slides was when it was first introduced, and it's regrettable that it's not available today. I want my friends to be very successful and I have no animosity towards them. The tools exist to build great things on the web and I hope this post inspires someone to make use of them. Many of you disagree with my assertions, and that's fine. But I'm not the only person who feels this way. Paul Irish an avid web evangelist and Tom Dale of the Ember project share my concerns. And while we might disagree on the role of the web, I think many people agree that it should empower developers to build great things. I've seen a lot of really great developers move on to other things because they share my frustrations and disappointments. … and yes, the bits vs bytes line about dial up was my mistake. :) but I don't think it really changes the point. [edits for clarity and spelling]
  • romain_dardour 14y ago
    While I agree about the "no reinventing the wheel" part (after all that's one of the benefits of our product), I think Cappucino had made some choices that the random developer could not come to terms with. I don't think that this is due to laziness or rouded-corner cravings (although the "new shiny toy" effect is very much existing). I think this has more to do with the different timelines web developers face when building apps. Not all of them can afford the long learning curves required by Cappucino and the fact that objective-J is only useful for Cappuccino. Not all of them need to build app-looking apps or spend lots of time bending the defaults to look like something else So the web community turns to low learning curve libraries as a side effect of not having the time to commit (as opposed to not wanting), better ones coming out all the time (things moving at a whole order of magnitude faster than in other software development areas), and using only 10% of the power brought by cappuccino. This encourages more quick, single feature libs, which in turns brings more developers into that worldview. Note that this argument is not about wether this is right or wrong. More about the why. One can note that making those micro libraries work together is getting harder and harder, and that some folks (full disclaimer, we are one of those) are building glue layers and light architectures to guide developers and ease integration and make those libraries interact together seamlessly. Take http://github.com/aurajs/aura http://github.com/aurajs/aura (that's the one we're working on). It acknowledges both the fact that small, single-feature libraries are the way the web is heading, and that making those interoperable, and easy to load (a clean module system is central to aura) needs work. Maybe small, badly written, non interoperable, single use libraries are just a step on the way to a truly modular, flexible and light web development process.
• easymovet 14y ago
  I see a lot of negative comments, many of them are from people far smarter than me and may be right, don't let them get to you. Their opinions are exactly that, opinions. You worked hard on something and it didn't work out the way you wanted it to, you have a right to be disgruntled. Congrats on the new Google gig!
• bokglobule 14y ago
  I often wonder if the problem with programming (or software engineering, if you prefer) is that we're still in the stage of where builders were in the middle ages. We assume the model of a "master builder" that has to know every aspect of every part of the process of building something new. Compare that to today where trades people specialize in one part of construction and hone it to a fine point. How many of us would hire an electrician to fix our plumbing, or a roofer to hang drywall? Maybe in the future this will be what happens to software development: you'll bring in a UI trade to implement the UI, a database trade, a caching trade, etc. People who've taken years to fully understand their niche of software construction very well. The other issue we don't have to face is any governmental enforcement of building codes (yet). When you install wiring in a building, you can't just run it however might be "cool" or "new". There are a variety of rules, that come from best practices developed over many years, that are followed. Imagine if before a client or a customer would accept a finished app if it had to pass inspection by a 3rd party for compliance with these "codes". I think we'd see a lot of the current state of development fall away pretty quickly. The newbies who won't take time to learn their craft, or quickly jump from new toy to new toy without learning any very well would be under pressure to change or leave the field.
• lucidquiet 14y ago
  Similarly, I've personally been seeing this a lot lately... the idea that "Done is Better than Perfect." And although I know it will never be perfect, the problem isn't perfection it's that this idea, fails to mention where the bar is set, or that it is set very low. "Among his various possible beings each man always finds one which is his genuine and authentic being. The voice which calls him to that authentic being is what we call 'vocation.' But the majority of men devote themselves to silencing that voice of the vocation and refusing to hear it. They manage to make a noise within themselves...to distract their own attention in order not to hear it; they defraud themselves by substituting for their genuine selves a false course of life." -- Jose Ortega Y Gasset The web is a very viscous place with all kinds of competition. Philosophically speaking, that form of competition can rob one of a chance at true mastery.
• leebaneese 14y ago
  > Objective-J Ya blew it.
• michaelwolfe 14y ago
  Any time you argue that everyone is crazy except for you, one of two things is possible: 1 - you are in the wrong and have some biases that led you there. 2 - everyone is crazy except for you Usually it is 1)
• marizmelo 14y ago
  I remember to look at Cappuccino and say - WOW, this will change everything (again). But then suddenly nothing happened. No articles, no tutorials on peers, no visible discussions, etc. Things became worst when Motorola bought 280north. That was a deal breaker for me. Uncertainty about the library future.
• thomas_h 14y ago
  I think you have to make a few distinctions that recognize both different developer backgrounds and developer aspirations. It's like one of those "magic quadrants" that analysts love: On the horizontal axis you'd have developer background: HTML/CSS/JS - OO Programmer On the vertical axis you'd have target application: Web Page - GUI-like App Web pages are about text, color, images, layouts and maybe animations - in short "appearance". Page breaks are ok. GUI apps are about controls/forms, lists, tables, trees, to interact with a backend - in short, they're about "functionality". Page breaks in a GUI app are disruptive and are therefore avoided. HTML guys hate latency, they're used to the most direct effects. OO guys usually don't mind to invest time before coming up with effects. HTML guys often shy away from learning a new programming language; it's important that they can apply the same skill set over and over again. OO guys don't mind to learn a new language, but don't like to miss out on paradigms and patterns they value. Cappuccion would be in the upper right quadrant (OO Programmer / GUI App), while e.g. jQuery would be in the lower left ( HTML/CSS/JS background / Web Page). Probably, the crowd behind the HTML/CSS/JS profile is larger than the OO programmer crowd. And the amount of effort spent on web pages with spiced-up appearance is larger than that of carefully crafted rich internet clients. But probably both have their relevance, so why trash one in favor of the other?! For someone advertising on the web a slick appearance is prime, while a vendor of set top-boxes values reliability of their web-based configuration GUI. The real problem arises, and that is probably Randy's pain, when the wrong technology and skill set is applied to a given problem.
• schmidtty 14y ago
  You offered unsolicited advice. Now its my turn to do the same and its really simple: Pipe the fuck down. Grow the fuck up. CHILL the fuck out. Interestingly, I do agree with some of your points.