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Comment by qwerty456127 | Hacker News Reader

IMHO the whole advantage of single-page apps is about separating the UI and the data + using the browser as a cross-platform UI toolkit, runtime and deployment engine. The reason for SPAs to exist is that browsers are the only way to deploy an app that runs on every OS, looks pretty, automatically updates in an instant every time you run it and can be discovered and ran by everybody in a single click. Just imagine a world where something like WPF was made a truly free standard with full-featured 100%-compatible open-source implementations available on all the major OSes (Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, iOS) from the beginning and packed with efficient support for apps to be ran straight from a URL.

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In my experience, SPAs often grow to the point where the client-server boundary ends up being right in the middle of data, not between UI and data. The client-side starts to maintain its own complex state and set of data transformations not immediately concerned with UI given anything less than the perfect API.

Java is pretty much all these things, except the highly subjective "looks pretty". It's kinda funny how Java was hated for not using native widgets, and now using native widgets is considered a negative.

The Java plugin, like Flash, was a security nightmare and poorly integrated with the rest of the stack.

Not having a bundled set of widgets is probably an advantage, flexibility wise.

People like to bash (ha!) JavaScript, but I think it’s begginer friendliness is often overlooked. Just look at how easy it is to get something done compared to Java in the browser.

That and load time probably contributed to its success more than anything else.

> The Java plugin, like Flash, was a security nightmare

Neither is inherently less secure than javascript running in a web browser.

> and poorly integrated with the rest of the stack.

Yeah, but, so? Maybe I'm too old and curmudgeonly but I preferred it when applications acted like applications and websites acted like websites. Now I have to deal with websites that are half application, without the responsiveness of either and built on a pile of franken-code.

> Neither is inherently less secure than javascript running in a web browser

Why do you think that? I’ve heard a lot of vulnerabilities in Java and Flash plugins but JavaScript not so much.

Because they where vulnerabilities in the JS engine of all browsers and they have similar issues. See the browser release notes for the last ten years. e.g. https://chromereleases.googleblog.com/2016/03/stable-channel...

Thing is the browser engines where are not so diligent about CVE's and they are necessary evil, while Java/Flash where optional evil. With the Flash plugin being significantly worse quality than the Java ones.

java plugin was a reputable good security sandbox. Features were added and some subtile security problems were found. Oracle repeatedly failed at fixing these problems because it wanted to avoid breaking old applications. The consequences of this bad management is that the reputation of java plugins is bad and they are prohibited in many enterprises. The problem is only a management problem, there were not technical reasons. The idea of having java application in a safe sandbox is perfectly viable except oracle.

Oracle ended up breaking Applets many times anyway. As someone who worked on a very complex applet during this period, the amount of times they changed security settings was crazy. Even some of those changes that had to be made in the manifests, broke security in the previous jvm version.

perhaps that every single web page malware has been served by javascript?

You know when it is a website, when it takes multiple seconds to load a page of text, that then appears empty because some random JS script from one of the 20+ different domains was blocked from loading ;-)

That, and the way what I'm reading keeps jumping around as images load in and f' up the layout.

Truly this is the progress we all hoped to see in computing in 2018.

Sun made a big mistake shipping Java 1.0 without serialization.

Back then I was writing applets for science education that would do things like send a mesh to a finite element solver and get the mesh back with stress information.

Back then 2/3 of the code and most of the loading time came from hand-written code to serialize and deserialize data structures. Eg. an applet could have been small and fast loading if serialization was built into the platform.

Java 1.1 added serialization, but it took a long time to get into browsers, Netscape added their own lame serialization scheme, etc... By then the rot was already setting in.

Although small applets can make sense some times I can hardly see a reason (but a habit) why would anybody want an application to run inside a browser window.

> it’s begginer friendliness

Isn't JavaScript code written by beginners almost as bug-prone as C/C++ code is? I wouldn't rely on code written by a beginner unless it is written in a strongly-typed mostly immutable functional language.

I would also disagree that is beginner friendly to write a webapp in javascript.

Unless the op, just meant getting "hello world" on the screen from an HTML file, but that is a meaningless metric imo.

Writing a web app in JS is hard, getting the workflow all sorted, and then writing bugfree code. IS more a herculean task than "beginner friendly"

I meant a step above from hello world. Doing something simple is simple.

The node, webpack, react stuff is very complicated indeed

Who said anything about a plugin? JNLP, or jdeploy, or shipping a jar.

Java WebStart has been discontinued and never worked fast. JavaFX is great but it seems it's too late for it already and Oracle seems having no enthusiasm about promoting it (did they ever have any interest in anything Sun but the patents anyway?).

"Pretty" is indeed subjective but it's not hard to understand what does it mean for the majority of non-geeks.

Despite the Oracle hate from developers that actually never placed Java applications in production, the Java community appreciates the work of Oracle and in many domains they have delivered a better work than Sun was doing in the last years.

JavaFX has been separated from core JDK, to allow for quicker development and integration into other vendors JDKs. Until now the Oracle JDK was the only one supporting JavaFX.

I hope this is going to help.

The problem came with E.E I think.. You have to edit like 10 XML files before even getting to the source code files. Granted with today's JS tooling we approaching that again :(

Without the static typing and IDE completion support thanks to XML Schema.

I will take XML over JSON every time I am the one setting the rules.

Most editors I use (e.g. Visual Studio Code) provide validation and completion of JSON using JSON Schema - which works pretty well.

I much prefer JSON to XML for most scenarios.

How do you validate comment locations?

Well, as JSON doesn't have comments that's not really a problem :-)

NB Not having comments is perhaps the biggest problem I have with JSON when it is used for things like configuration files that will be hand crafted. 99% of the JSON I work with is generated and consumed programmatically so comments aren't really an issue.

Isn't it very easy to add comments support to JSON? Why not just agree to allow /* ... */ anywhere inside it and add this feature to JSON parsers? Honestly I didn't even knew this is not supported to the moment. If nobody bothered so far, doesn't this mean only a tiny portion of people needs this?

My favourite way to go about comments is to have them inline, as first class data members. (Not that I think either JSON or XML are good ideas. Hierarchical structures are really hard to handle).

There are cases where a SPA might be a good idea, I think those cases can be counted on one hand. I don’t mean the products, but use cases.

I could imagine it would be more complex to build Slack using traditional server-side rendered HTML than building it as an SPA.

Nowadays though you see blogs, CRM systems, etc being built as SPAs, which just makes it more complex to work on them.

for webapps they are great.

However most websites are not webapps and are not needed. A page that is basically just text, a webpage equivalent of a magazine page does not need to be SPA - yet usually is sigh

'Webapp' is not a narrow enough use case. 'Chat app' would be more of the depth I am talking about and even there you can easily build a basic chat application using server-side rendering and smidgins of javascript to add new messages to a <div>.

Generally I would say that SPA are overkill.

I'm pretty sure that's the only place where SPA ( or MPA ) aren't a solution in search of a problem is a site/application that needs distributed compute due to a number of requests it receives in a short amount of time.

SPA blogs? So the individual posts don't have their own URLs?

A good SPA uses `pushState` and URL routing to have individual URLs for views.

One example is the Ludum Dare site (ldjam.com). They migrated from Wordpress to a custom blog which I would call a SPA. It loads posts from JSON and won't render anything without Javascript.

Don't ask me, I am not the inventor of such advanced technology ;). Apparently there is some benefit to server-side rendering of blog posts.

Feeling enthusiastic about SPAs in general can't stop me from saying this souds like a horrible, fundamentally pervert idea.

I imagined a world of apps designed with xaml /me shudders

Interesting, i've had the exact opposite feeling with XAML. I've written a bunch of Silverlight and WPF, and always felt it to be probably the best UI framework i have worked with. Certainly beats all the web frameworks, and imho it was also better than Swift and Interface Builder.

I mostly like WPF (and use it a lot), but there are a few design issues that drive me nuts. The most common one is ObservableCollections--if I have a List in the model that is going to update as something happens, how do I bind that to something in the view? Does my model throw events that trigger the Viewmodel to update an ObservableCollection?

In Angular it's trivially easy to bind to an array and have it update. In WPF, it's hard enough that I architect my applications around that one single problem.

After doing that for the last four years, the prospect of focusing again in Web is what makes me shudder.

> I imagined a world of apps designed with xaml /me shudders

Mmm...XAML/WPF has one thing going for it though...you can be assured that a code-base you haven't touched for year will still work :)

Great point!

Why? Doesn't it suit designing apps better than HTML or anything?

you tell me. Real world examples lead me to believe otherwise..

Good summary ! I agree and would add the SPA(craze) also bought us the JS-Frameworks(pick anyone you like with more than 100 stars). I don't like JS-Frameworks... I just LOVE them more than JQUERY Projects ! :/

You can separate the data with multiple page apps. Either by having different JS for each HTML, or even rendering the HTML on a server which in itself calls the API.

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