I work for about 2k users, they do not give a shit about reactivity... build a monolith, make it comfy, embrace page refresh (nobody gives a fuck about that in the real world), and get shit done.
The web finally provides a widespread standard for deploying applications inexpensively. Unfortunately, the technology used to build user interfaces for the web remains somewhat mediocre.
It’s unfortunate that history took some wrong turns with X11, Java, Flash, Silverlight, .NET, and countless other alternatives that I haven’t personally lived through.
Hopefully, someone will eventually find a way to make developing web applications comfortable and the broader community will embrace it.
I do not understand why people hold this impression, especially in corporate environments.
Windows supports both system and per-user deployments; the latter so you don't even need administrator rights. And with Intune, deployments can be pulled or pushed.
Many desktop applications are written in .Net so you don't even need to install the runtime because it's preinstalled on the operating system.
Even ClickOnce deployments -- which you can deploy on the web or on a file share -- pretty much make deployments painless.
EDIT: For the naysayers: please then explain to me why Steam is so successful at deploying large games on multiple platforms?
And is there even a guarantee that your deploy will be rolled out in X minutes?
Version skew remains one of the biggest sources of catastrophic bugs at the company I work for, and that's not even taking into client app ver, just skew between the several services we have. Once you add client app ver, we have to support things for 3 years.
At my one-person company I just do a Kubernetes deploy, it goes out in a couple minutes and everyone has the latest ver whether they like it or not. I don't have the resources to maintain a dozen versions simultaneously.
The webapp doesn't care if someone's machine was down overnight or if the paranoid lady in design managed to install some local "antivirus" which blocked the updated rollout or if the manager of sales has some unique setting on his machine which for some inscrutable reason does silly things to the new version. If their web browser works, the inventory database works for them, and they're on the latest version. If their web browser doesn't work, well, your support teams would have had to eventually take care of that anyway.
Not sure yet how to solve this problem on the Internet yet though. How can we prevent uninformed masses from creating incentives for businesses, that turn the web into a dystopia?
Not on my computers. At home, or at work
Weylus gives you a URL that you can visit on the device and instantly use it. Try doing that with native apps. They'd need native apps for Windows, Linux, Mac, iOS, Android... get them on the app stores too, support all the different Linux distros... or just a single URL that works instantly anywhere.
Steam works for the same reason the App Store works, it targets mostly a single platform (Windows) and all dependencies are bundled in. The Steam client itself is a web app running on the chrome engine, though.
The last .NET version to be deployed this way has a 10 year old feature set. Nowadays you bundle the parts of .NET you need with the application.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/install/window...
Although, on re-read, maybe they meant there's a good chance another application already installed it? This I wouldn't agree with, as applications often insist on installing different versions of the system-wide runtime, even for the same major version.
To be specific, .NET install is version-aware and would manage those side by side, unless the destination folder is overridden.
Because Valve puts lots of time and money into making it work for their customers (https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/graphs/contributors), time and money that the average small business can't afford.
- many people refuse to upgrade for various reasons so we have to support ancient versions (especially for important clients), for stuff like license activations etc.
- various misconfigurations (or OS updates) on Windows can make the app suddenly crash and burn - and you waste time investigating the problem. My favorite recent bug: the app works OK everywhere except on some Japanese systems where it just crashes with access violation (see the next bullet point)
- debugging is hard, because you don't have immediate access to the machine where the bug triggered
- originally it was built 100% for Windows but now we have people asking for a MacOS port and it's a lot of work
- people crack our protection 1 day after release and can use it without paying
SaaS has none of those problems:
- people are used to the fact that SaaS applications are regularly updated and can't refuse to upgrade
- modern browsers are already cross-platform
- browser incompatibilities are easier to resolve
- you debug your own, well-known environment
- if someone doesn't play by the rules, you just restrict access with 1 button
> EDIT: For the naysayers: please then explain to me why Steam is so successful at deploying large games on multiple platforms?
How many games are multi-platform on steam? Checking the top 20 current most played games, 14 of them are windows only. If it's so easy to be multi-platform, why would 14 of the top 20 games not be multi-platform? Oh, it's because it's NOT EASY. Conversely, web apps are cross platform by default.
Only 2 of the top 20 games supported 3 platforms (windows, mac, steam-deck). 1 was windows+steam-deck, 3 were windows+mac
if you look into the support forums on steam for any random game you'll find lots of complaints about stability and crashes, many of which are likely to be esoteric system-specific problems.
I wrote an inventory management program for my father's hazardous waste company. Used .net mvc as the backend, WPF as the frontend. WPF sucks in many ways, but I got it working and have had zero complaints.
I built that program almost 20 years ago. Until last year I spend maybe 5-6 hours total in maintenance, mostly ssl cert updates. Let that sink in.
Games were made in flash so it can't be that slow.
Maybe slow for time to load. I think we got that down a bit and this wasn't to render content but a utility for a signed up user.
Modern day SPAs are far, far worse offenders when it comes to smothering resources.
I was so happy when it finally started to disappear. That kind of sheer disregard for my system resources is inexcusable.
As for the speed of the flash player itself it was quite good.
I hope that, in the long term, wasm and canvas (or something similar) will gradually take over this niche. Frameworks like Avalonia already let you write a desktop app and then surface it in the browser, today. This stuff is still rough around the edges, particularly wrt accessibility, but there's nothing unsolvable there in principle, it just needs time and effort (and money).
Nice work. Reminds me of "A Dark Room" and how a simple mostly-text interface with a bit of HTML/CSS/JS can have such a big impact.
If you’re writing an SPA, and it isn’t Twitter or a content consumption platform, and it isn’t necessary to be API-driven, seriously just stop. You’re not clever, you’re not improving the experience, you’re only appealing to the tastes of other programmers. If billion-dollar companies can’t get them working perfectly, you certainly won’t.
If you think that’s interesting, send me your firm’s URL, I’ll consider applying. (Edit: or really anyone reading this who is interested - government of a foreign nation outside the US is not viable, unfortunately.)
Moving a navigation/menu from one app to another takes 3 people 2-3 weeks by now. Changing the "router" to update the TS version is just as time consuming. Things that would have taken 1 day max. take now 2-3 weeks. That is 1/14th of the productivity and people get paid for that, more than I did. Oh and did I mention the menu responsiveness was broken for months at a certain viewport width? I did report it, but apparently it was so hard to fix, that it could not be done in a quiet hour, so it took months laying around in the queue of things to fix.
It seems unintuitive, but traversing an object tree using reflection to generate json is just slower than using an HTML template, which is probably a rope data structure.
Issues with SPAs are "core features straight up don't work " and "page is now just an endless spinner."
I know which I prefer.
Edit: just tried it again and seems they fixed it! The ads stays in loading state forever but the site is usable again. Wonder if they did something on their side or if they changed ad provider.
I openly admit that I'd rather learn a new framework than touch anything to do with figuring out how the browser is intended to behave in practice. What an abomination and insult to humanity.
Edit: holy shit y'all do not like the earnest approach to technology
``` fetch('/my-content').then(async res => { if(res.ok) { document.getElementById('my-element').innerHtml = await res.text(); } }) ```
Something like that. Doesn't get much easier. Gone are the days of browser inconsistencies, at least of you stick to "Baseline Widely available" APIs which is now prominently displayed on MDN.
You do have to call `getElementById` on a document. There can be many documents in a window.
Although a very consistent convention, there are no guardrails put in place to prevent something from setting the same id on two or more elements.
getElementById will return the first element that it finds with the id, but you can't know for sure if it is the only one without additional checks
<textarea id="userNotes"></textarea>
<button type="button" id="copyButton">Copy</button>
<script>
copyButton.addEventListener('click', () => {
navigator.clipboard.writeText(userNotes.value)
copyButton.innerText = 'Copied'
setTimeout(() => copyButton.innerText = 'Copy', 1000)
})
</script>function getId(v) {return document.getElementById(v)}
Dev tools allows $ $$, dunno, make a macro?
We must not defy the system!
const g = (x) => document.getElementById(x);But what's the problem again?
I get that huge apps probably need a lot more than that, but so many people these days reach for heavy frameworks for everything, because it’s all they know.
It’s such a pain having clear separation in development where everything runs off of the react server by default, but then it won’t when deploying, so either you end up doing all sorts of weird stuff or you need to be building and running production locally constantly, thus defeating the whole convenience of having a dev server that can hot reload the changes
The author of this article blog is describing some more advanced SPA-like scenarios, but those are completely optional
Though I think maybe if one is using it for a different purpose, like looking for apartments or roommates then that's probably shit.
Why not?
It's really irritating for your users. They might not consciously be able to point it out as the cause of their irritation, but they'll like your app a lot less.