Comment by tabtab | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tabtab | Hacker News Reader

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Re: Obviously, WYSIWYG and other graphical builders will always need a specific IDE in order to do RAD, but these are special cases, not the norm anymore.

I don't know why it died, WYSIWYG and GUI-friendly IDE's allowed higher productivity in that "one-man-bands" (small staff) could do the entire project. Now development is often layered into specialists. Things like UI design and ORM's have longer learning curves, which emphasizes specialists. But staff is larger per feature: less productive. (There are many times I wanted to shoot Bootstrap in the head when I couldn't get it to act how I wanted. Something in WYSIWYG that would take 20 seconds becomes a 2 day trial-and-error session in Bootstrap.)

WYSIWYG/GUI-IDE saved money. Most businesses don't run their internal productivity software on mobile anyhow. "Progressive" UI's are a money sink in practice.

The trend predictors got it WRONG: desktops live on in biz. Our anti-state-GUI web standards don't help. Businesses really want cheap rich desktop-like GUI's for productivity software.

I'm not against flow-based layouts, but they should be an option, along with WYSIWYG.

> Businesses really want cheap rich desktop-like GUI's for productivity software

Can I ask where you you see this demand, is it industry specific?

I was under the impression that the benefits (easy deployment to a known runtime aka the browser, open ports (80/443) in the firewall, large developer pool, potentially cross-platform use) outweigh the UI shortcomings and budgets were shifted to web-based productivity software.

The features you list are not necessarily mutually exclusive, but too many think they are, and that's the problem. For some reason people seem to think it's either rich GUI -or- web. With a decent stateful GUI markup standard, we can have the best of both. HTML wasn't meant to be stateful nor for rich interactive GUI's. Faking it with JavaScript has proved a bloated crashy mess.

End users who care about productivity want rich GUI's. Rich GUI's use screen real-estate better than "progressive" web apps and have abilities like right-click, rollover text, etc.; and it's cheaper to develop because they (optionally) can use WYWIWYG for many parts of it. WYWIWYG is just plain cheaper and easier to get right. You don't need "flow layout" specialists who can tame sucky CSS/DOM, which makes alchemy look logical.

Remember that businesses don't really care how software works as long as it does the job and is affordable in creation and maintenance. The bloated web stacks are not. It's too much code to do the same thing UI-fit tools did with less because they were closer to the CRUD/GUI domain itself. Web stacks are too fucking layered such that you spend most of the time managing communication between layers instead of on real biz logic. I stand by this and if you look at the code you should agree.

We DEVOLVED. Current web standards may be fine for social media, but not real work. We let the "cool stuff" pollute real work in cubicle-land. Oh, and git off my lawn! ;-)

I thought you meant native desktop apps, not web apps.

I remember when ExtJS was positioned in the late 2000s to mimik rich desktop UIs and I think there are still lots of component based frameworks to use and pay for, if Bootstrap doesn't cut it. The prices are steep though.

As far as developer productivity, the desktop-oriented IDE's were indeed better. Yes, you had less choice, but that didn't matter much if tried to think like a plumber instead of Picasso. The problem was that deployment and installation was a pain. Microsoft actually improved that for its products, but I believe if we had a stateful GUI markup standard, we could have very similar tools without desktop installs (other than installing a GUI browser).

Oracle Forms kind of worked like this (mostly before Java era), although its GUI control language was proprietary and not XML. Oracle Forms had its warts, but was a good proof concept for the GUI browser. Developers got a lot of work done under it.

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