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Having a hard time phrasing this without being a jerk, but many of these "native is better than web" psuedo-rants contain misinformation or seem to be lacking i

Having a hard time phrasing this without being a jerk, but many of these "native is better than web" psuedo-rants contain misinformation or seem to be lacking in an understanding of the current state of web technologies like persistance, app caching, etc, etc.

micampe 13y ago
The reverse is also often true.
claudius 13y ago
How are his points regarding computational performance and local handling of large amounts of data misinformed? There’s a reason why there is Wolfram|Alpha and Mathematica.
- drivebyacct2 13y ago
  You're right of course, I didn't mean "all" of it by any means. In fact, last night I lamented about web app overhead and the effect on performance. That having been said, it doesn't make his bits about graphics acceleration, local caching or storage any less inaccurate.
rimantas 13y ago
Sorry, but I guess you lack in the understanding of both. Yeah, app caching looks nice in theory. Now implement it reliably in practice. What will you use in the place of Core Data? Local storage? IndexedDB(with no support in default browser both on iOS and Android)? How will your replacement for UITableView with reusable cells look like? How about the same combined with UIFetchedResultController? I am not even talking about Core Graphics, animation, etc, etc. Sorry, but anyone really wanting to advance web tech on mobile should first learn what native SDKs really offer. And then think long and think hard about an answer to this question: "Should we?Why?". How about finding the way finally to serve responsible images on the web instead of fighting wars against native apps?
- drivebyacct2 13y ago
  I'm well aware of what native SDKs offer. I don't know why you assumed I'm unfamiliar with native development. As for the last statement, and much of the others, I'm not even sure what you're asking. If you want a nice syntax for it, then yeah, wait for the spec to be finished. Otherwise, you're probably implementing that logic yourself. The same as if you want a native app to pull in different assets (unless we're talking about UI assets and a sane OS, but still, it's not like that's a compelling lacking feature). Look, I'd be happy to be wrong but there are half a dozen inaccuracies in this very article about what is possible with web technology and how browsers themselves work. Am I suggesting Angry Birds in web tech (even though it's already been done): No. Am I suggesting that shit basic apps like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc make more sense as simple, functional, accessible webapps? Absolutely.
  - gdubs 13y ago
    FWIW Facebook's HTML5 app was terrible. They recently made a switch back to native.[1] 1: https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/under-the-hood-rebuilding-facebook-for-ios/10151036091753920 https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/under-th...
    - drivebyacct2 13y ago
      And then Sencha remade it and it managed to be faster than the native app. Also note that the actual mobile Facebook site remains as fast as the native app and was always faster than the "native" app that just used webtech. So, ironically, the webapp still wins when used and developed properly for a Facebook type app.
      - kenjackson 13y ago
        Native apps should always be faster except in the case where the native app isn't architected properly or web services are poorly implemented. Unfortunately, I've seen that both are often the case. For CRUD apps like Facebook, it's often easier to do them right as web apps, but a good native app developer with a good backend team should almost always be able to beat them.

micampe 13y ago

The reverse is also often true.

claudius 13y ago

How are his points regarding computational performance and local handling of large amounts of data misinformed? There’s a reason why there is Wolfram|Alpha and Mathematica.

drivebyacct2 13y ago
You're right of course, I didn't mean "all" of it by any means. In fact, last night I lamented about web app overhead and the effect on performance. That having been said, it doesn't make his bits about graphics acceleration, local caching or storage any less inaccurate.

rimantas 13y ago

Sorry, but I guess you lack in the understanding of both. Yeah, app caching looks nice in theory. Now implement it reliably in practice. What will you use in the place of Core Data? Local storage? IndexedDB(with no support in default browser both on iOS and Android)? How will your replacement for UITableView with reusable cells look like? How about the same combined with UIFetchedResultController? I am not even talking about Core Graphics, animation, etc, etc. Sorry, but anyone really wanting to advance web tech on mobile should first learn what native SDKs really offer. And then think long and think hard about an answer to this question: "Should we?Why?". How about finding the way finally to serve responsible images on the web instead of fighting wars against native apps?

drivebyacct2 13y ago
I'm well aware of what native SDKs offer. I don't know why you assumed I'm unfamiliar with native development. As for the last statement, and much of the others, I'm not even sure what you're asking. If you want a nice syntax for it, then yeah, wait for the spec to be finished. Otherwise, you're probably implementing that logic yourself. The same as if you want a native app to pull in different assets (unless we're talking about UI assets and a sane OS, but still, it's not like that's a compelling lacking feature). Look, I'd be happy to be wrong but there are half a dozen inaccuracies in this very article about what is possible with web technology and how browsers themselves work. Am I suggesting Angry Birds in web tech (even though it's already been done): No. Am I suggesting that shit basic apps like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc make more sense as simple, functional, accessible webapps? Absolutely.
- gdubs 13y ago
  FWIW Facebook's HTML5 app was terrible. They recently made a switch back to native.[1] 1: https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/under-the-hood-rebuilding-facebook-for-ios/10151036091753920 https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/under-th...
  - drivebyacct2 13y ago
    And then Sencha remade it and it managed to be faster than the native app. Also note that the actual mobile Facebook site remains as fast as the native app and was always faster than the "native" app that just used webtech. So, ironically, the webapp still wins when used and developed properly for a Facebook type app.
    - kenjackson 13y ago
      Native apps should always be faster except in the case where the native app isn't architected properly or web services are poorly implemented. Unfortunately, I've seen that both are often the case. For CRUD apps like Facebook, it's often easier to do them right as web apps, but a good native app developer with a good backend team should almost always be able to beat them.