5 ms·

The web, services more than 3 devices. There is added complexity when you do that. If you love cocoa so much you should checkout: http://www.cappuccino-projec

by 1stop 12y ago

The web, services more than 3 devices. There is added complexity when you do that. If you love cocoa so much you should checkout: http://www.cappuccino-project.org/ http://www.cappuccino-project.org/

mattgreenrocks 12y ago
But the complexity that emerges is not from supporting multiple devices! It comes from retrofitting everything atop a model originally designed for navigating a graph of linked documents. This is a severe deficiency in the original design, and no framework can patch it over. As developers, we're the ones left holding the pieces to an abortion of design day after day. This state of affairs is unacceptable. I remember when Swing was big. Everyone was gushing about it despite obvious flaws: non-native UI, poor startup time, horrible accessibility, and ridiculous memory consumption. Industry loves the idea of one platform-to-rule-them-all, no matter how far behind the uber-platform is. It would rather dump endless amounts of money and time into a patchwork of hacks than admit that it was wrong. We're way past due for a VM for webapps. I don't see why the VM couldn't be added as a dual to the current HTML/JS/CSS model. URIs beginning with app:// would use the new VM model. There's a shocking amount of defeatism, both by developers and institutions surrounding the tooling of webapps.
- DougWebb 12y ago
  We've had VMs for webapps, more or less: Java Applets, Flash, Silverlight. They've all been deficient too, and Javascript on top of the DOM with HTML/CSS has won out. I don't think changing the url protocol would make a difference (and people will still want to embed apps in html pages, and interoperate with JS on those pages.) I don't know what the answer is, and I agree with you that a huge part of the problem is that trying to build web applications on a platform intended for web documents doesn't work very well. But it seems to work better than everything else we've tried.

by 1stop 12y ago

The web, services more than 3 devices. There is added complexity when you do that. If you love cocoa so much you should checkout: http://www.cappuccino-project.org/ http://www.cappuccino-project.org/

mattgreenrocks 12y ago

But the complexity that emerges is not from supporting multiple devices! It comes from retrofitting everything atop a model originally designed for navigating a graph of linked documents. This is a severe deficiency in the original design, and no framework can patch it over. As developers, we're the ones left holding the pieces to an abortion of design day after day. This state of affairs is unacceptable. I remember when Swing was big. Everyone was gushing about it despite obvious flaws: non-native UI, poor startup time, horrible accessibility, and ridiculous memory consumption. Industry loves the idea of one platform-to-rule-them-all, no matter how far behind the uber-platform is. It would rather dump endless amounts of money and time into a patchwork of hacks than admit that it was wrong. We're way past due for a VM for webapps. I don't see why the VM couldn't be added as a dual to the current HTML/JS/CSS model. URIs beginning with app:// would use the new VM model. There's a shocking amount of defeatism, both by developers and institutions surrounding the tooling of webapps.

DougWebb 12y ago
We've had VMs for webapps, more or less: Java Applets, Flash, Silverlight. They've all been deficient too, and Javascript on top of the DOM with HTML/CSS has won out. I don't think changing the url protocol would make a difference (and people will still want to embed apps in html pages, and interoperate with JS on those pages.) I don't know what the answer is, and I agree with you that a huge part of the problem is that trying to build web applications on a platform intended for web documents doesn't work very well. But it seems to work better than everything else we've tried.