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Comment by pzuraq | Hacker News Reader

I am, indeed, too young to have accurate memories there! Of course right after I posted this I started hearing about GWT and Closure, that's a bit of egg on my face. I mentioned Gmail as an important marker, everyone I talked to remembered it as the _moment_ which proved that JS could write full applications in the browser, but I assumed that it was written with an internal framework of some sort (none of my mentors who've been in the industry mentioned it when I brought up Gmail, and there's no mention of it on wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gmail)

That said, I think it's an important landmark and I may end up revising this post to add a bit more discussion about it. Thanks for pointing it out!

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The buzzword circa 2006 was "Rich Internet Application" framework/platform and the concept was not even totally new then. It included GWT, but also an Adobe product built on Flash called Flex and some other vendor solutions that compiled to Javascript that I no longer recall the names of. The space was well-defined enough that there was a Gartner magic quadrant for it.

I had a big interest in RIA at the time. The big players were Adobe AIR, Microsoft Silverlight, Eclipse RCP, Netbeans, and I also considered JavaFX--I might be forgetting another one.

Silverlight had the best performance/fit for my purposes and sadly was the first of many to go away, largely due to the popularity of iPhone and these platform/tools being excluded. Too bad Apple only promotes Apple's innovations and actively suppresses others.

Not to toot our own horn, but I'd look into Cappuccino and 280 Slides too (we were YC no less!) and were the first iteration in the GWT era to extend JS itself and transpile in the browser.

Honestly it’s a shame Cappuccino didn’t take off it’s actually a super interesting framework and was (is?) extremely powerful even by today's standards

Personally I feel that Cappuccino is one of the last frameworks that still cared about a kind of interaction design that’s no longer discussed on the web, replaced mostly by more devops/abstraction-oriented discussions.

I manage a web UI programming language in my free time, and the juxtaposition of folks claiming FP ergonomics benefits, then upon my request, showing a static, interaction-less end result whose improved version would obviate their pristine architecture, is pretty staggering. The typical defense is "hey we're not designers" but if you zoom out a bit you realize the whole environment doesn't foster engineers to care about design concerns anymore (barring a niche but valuable vertical of optimizing for payload size). This in turn puts pressure back onto designers who come to expect less and less of what they care about on the web.

Just the other day a newcomer shipped an animated row transition after fighting her framework for 3 weeks. The designer was delighted, but the manager didn't even get the point because he matured in whichever era of JS framework that de-emphasized acquiring taste in interactions.

I myself come from a Flash background, so rather than seeing an upward trend, I see a decline in UX concerns, followed by an incline of devops-related concerns in UI frameworks (accompanied by HN comments saying that in both cases the web should have stayed as a document format, only to end up with an awkward mix of document + app architecture their desktop apps through Electron anyway).

If I were to categorize these "eras", I'd rather take the perspective of wondering at which point, and why, framework process ended up more important than the product. Heck, a similar thing is happening on native too, unfortunately. Where did all the interaction designers go?

Maybe AR would nudge more folks to learn and focus on rendering, gestures, transitions, framerate, intent and the rest.

You might want to look into Outlook Web Access. It predated gmail by many years and is the reason today we have XMLHttpRequest.

No worries, as you weren't working then, but to give some context, what you have in the "first frameworks" I would probably call the third generation of frameworks. So the breakdown you have is nice, but probably only covers the second half or maybe third of the story.

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