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Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

A game changer would a Delphi like RAD tooling IDE, fully based on WebComponents, with backend integration and an eco-system of companies selling UI components, not yet another CLI tool.

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Have you ever tried Adobes Flex Builder?

That was good.

Only drawback .. it was based on flash and got killed by Adobe.

Flash (and Flex as collater damage) got killed by Apple. But yeah, I agree even now, nothing compares to Adobe Flex on the developer productivity aspect

Flex was better than anything in use for web front end to this day, imo. Aside from requiring Flash, but iirc targeting HTML/js as an output format was on the roadmap.

We have Apache Royale https://royale.apache.org/ for that. Compile your Flex MXML + ActionScript to HTML + JS and more.

Yet, as a user, there's nothing I dreaded more than the all-Flash application. Binary blob, no integration with the OS, and accessibility was an afterthought. Basic things like highlighting text to copy, tabbing between controls, Enter to submit, would not work. We should take care to not view the history of Flash through rose-tinted glasses.

I know some people think that. Personally, I hated both the programming model and the interfaces that resulted from it. It was much worse than the competitive HTML/CSS interfaces of the era to actually use in most cases.

Flash got replaced by Animate CC and they still sell Dreamweaver, but it not quite the same.

Pagedraw's working on it! First a UI builder where you draw in position:absolute and get clean flexbox React out, later an integrated platform with answers all the way to the backend

Good luck with Pagedraw.

CxJS is designed having desktop-like, data-intensive applications in mind and offers a full set of UI components and charts out of the box. https://cxjs.io

Disclaimer: I'm the author.

Looks interesting, good luck with CxJS .

Why no one create it yet?

Maybe because Web development is dominated by FOSS tooling and as such very few companies are willing to invest the money to pull it off, as very few would be willing to pay for such tools.

Then there is the whole Web foundation that makes it pretty hard to actually use layout designers and components in a way that can work across frameworks and browsers.

Only now with CSS Grid and WebComponents is the Web finally catching up with what was already possible in desktop framework engines of the late 90's.

There are a few startups working on these ideas, but again, the main question is how they will manage to stay alive.

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