In all seriousness, anything that spits out canvas for a simple textbox is completely misguided about what the web is.
I get the joke. It is sad though how Java didn't end up being the ubiquitous runtime for browsers... It started off so promising... Compiling source to byte code is really fast in Java (and modern browsers generally do much more work compiling JavaScript). Even if the browser downloaded source code (and why not? --byte code is so much more compact and faster to parse), you wouldn't even notice the compiling down to bytecode step.
It's amazing how badly the Java ball got dropped.
It still boggles my mind that Sun Microsystems fully owned the tech for the only ubiquitous browser plugin for full fledged applications with > 95% deployment and somehow screwed it up and went out of business a few years later. Despite all their engineering prowess it seems like they just couldn't make Java work seamlessly and smoothly. I'd like to think it was just a hard engineering challenge, but as someone who went all in on Java WebStart for deployment at one point and then watched them take it from a highly attractive platform to actively ruining it within a few years, I have to attribute it more to incompetence.
They never really figured out how to be in the software business if it wasn't in service of selling hardware. Such an amazing fail.
On top of it all, Java integration was really just an excuse to plop a grossly out of place app UI in the browser window. Would have been much better if we could have had deeper behind the scene integration with the DOM layer.
The problem was that the browsers were busy loading up on every feature they could (including JavaScript) while also providing Java runtimes that would load after the fact (and the Java load times were often much better than the browser load times, but since the Java runtime load was deferred, it was a much more painful experience).
You could keep browsers lightweight by doing much of the stuff browsers were doing into Java, but the problem with that is that the browsers were in a race to differentiate from each other, and the whole point of Java was that the experience was uniform. So instead we got a rush of poorly considered browser capabilities that we were stuck with for an extremely long time.
I can't blame the browser makers... Sun never came up with a business proposition for them that encouraged focusing on a better Java experience.
I suspect the goal is a way to bring Java desktop applications into the browser without rewriting the application from scratch.
Personally, as a fan of Blazor, I thought this was going to be a Java-based analog of Blazor; or a modernized replacement for GWT.
(One flavor of Blazor compiles C# to WASM, and uses a C# templating engine to generate HTML.)
A Java option for modern web apps exists, and it's called Flavour: https://flavour.sourceforge.io/
* Build SPAs in Java with HTML templates and components
* Fast build times and batteries-included build framework
* Easy calls to Java web services, just invoke a method and Flavour handles marshalling and unmarshalling, you just see/use Java objects.
* Full-stack refactoring
* Built on TeaVM, so you get the all the benefits of a mature, performant framework with support for threads and multiple JVM languages (bytecode-based transpilation).
TeaVM vs Blazor comparison chart: https://frequal.com/java/TeaVmVsBlazorChart.html
TeaVM longer comparison with Blazor: https://frequal.com/java/TeaVmVsBlazorWasm1-0.html
Java Magazine article on Flavour and TeaVM: https://blogs.oracle.com/javamagazine/post/java-in-the-brows...
Blazor has the full task API. Asynchronous tasks run just like Javascript promises.
Does TeaVM have true threading, or is it emulating threads via some higher-level concept? (IE, if I have a multicore CPU, will TeaVM take advantage of multiple cores?)
Unless you're trying to do true CPU-intense parallel computing inside the browser, where you need the power of real CPU-level concurrency, "real threads" in the browser has no gain over the task API.
I really dislike this stuff. It's easy-ish to write, but it's like the authors of it hate everything about the web.
SPAs do a lot of annoying stuff, and blazor encourages all of it.
I really hope things swing back away from this grotesque tight binding between the server and the client.
You can get there the old-fashioned way if all your assets are cached in the browser with long timeouts; but that implies that you're doing something like putting hashes in the asset URL and hashing them as part of your build process. (This, is why loading JavaScript and CSS from CDNs helps with performance.)
Otherwise, every time you navigate to a new page on a non-SPA, the browser still needs to send an IF-CHANGED-SINCE request to the server.
As a developer, though, the BIG drawback of SPAs is that they require building much stricter APIs for everything. In a traditional server-side HTML page, you can quickly prototype something where the code that's putting together the HTML has access to privileged data that you can't expose through an API. (IE, if you just need to prototype something, server-side HTML rendering code can directly talk to the database.)
But that solves the problem, doesn't it? And it seems a lot simpler than implementing an SPA.
Django has this feature built-in. You just have to enable ManifestStaticFilesStorage: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/4.2/ref/contrib/staticfile...
Depends on your design goals.
BTW, I'm not pro/against SPAs. It's just a tool, and like all tools, they have their advantages and disadvantages.
In general, the fact that you can update the page without a server-side round trip is a major advantage. Granted, you can also do that with server-side rendering; but then your rendering logic is defined in two places.
TeaVM seems to be the same except it compiles Java to JavaScript which means has fast startup times.
Web browsers and their fundamental development foundations are best described as a set of mostly well meaning compromises, and so even modern browsers have been updated to support all the other disagreeable things you have mentioned, even having the ability to navigate the browser history within an SPA
You can write libraries and either approach can use the same library.
Server-side Blazor keeps a websocket open to send messages back and forth. If you can tolerate the latency, it allows your UI code to be able to handle data that needs to remain secret on the server.
Blazor WebAssemly requires you make explicity Ajax-like Calls to external web services in order to interact with a server and data. There is no server side framework in WebAssembly for maintaining state. State is entirely client side.
Blazor Server basically uses Web Sockets (with fallbacks) to communicate changes between client and server, this is far more efficient than using http request calls. State here is server side. But differs from all other frameworks in that state is trasmitted over sockets not http requests.
I'm not convinced you have actually used any kind blazor tbh
>I'm not convinced you have actually used any kind blazor tbh
good for you, buddy.
It's just a question of time before the containerized crowd discover that the exact version of Chrome they test their website with can be compiled to the WASM+canvas platform, bundled with the website, and solve all browser issues forever...
That sounds like a horrible idea. I hope it never comes to fruition.