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It's striking how often new web libraries come along. Are they genuinely better?

• bjt 14y ago
  Very often yes, when you consider that the "better" question is not one-dimensional. Rails and Django are good at building traditional web apps where the logic and data live on the server. They have less to offer on the client side, where JS frameworks like Backbone, Angular, and Ember crop up. They also don't do async well out of the box, which you want if you're going to do streaming updates in real time. So node.js, EventMachine, and Gevent come along to solve that problem. There are some very young frameworks (Meteor, Derby) trying to solve all the above problems at once. I haven't used them, but my impression is that they're not really there yet. I think the underlying pain point from the article is that iOS and Android have the luxury of being able to iterate on the whole stack at the same time, which means they can move way more quickly than web standards, which can take years of argument and refinement, with disparate implementations in different browsers, which then get papered over in various ways by different client side libraries.