Comment by SiVal | Hacker News Reader

Comment by SiVal | Hacker News Reader

I don't really understand what's going on in this client-side Web app space, and I'd love it if someone could clarify it.

My probably mistaken impression is that Facebook did this with React, decided that even with this virtual DOM, Web apps just weren't worth doing except as a backup to "real" native apps, and abandoned it.

Then Google decided that Angular was the way to do Web apps, discovered they were doing it wrong and that Facebook's virtual DOM was the way to go, and abandoned Angular 1's approach for an approach tried and abandoned by Facebook.

Then Google moved on to Polymer and its HTML components approach, which might be fundamental to Angular 2 or might be a new approach that they intend to use with something other than Angular.

Again, I'm obviously confused about what's going on in this big players' next-gen client-side web app space. Could anyone clarify?

Your timelines are off.

What youre referring to is that the early FB IOS app essentially wrapped a webview in order to display its stream, but the webview performance at the time was atrocious and they quickly abandoned it for natively build components. More recently(2013), post Instagram acquisition, Facebook developed a virtual dom framework named react and its currently used in several places of their web app.

Similarly with Angular which was introduced ~5 years ago, they decided that for the new rewrite it makes sense to use a virtual-dom like technology at the render level. The change is evolutionary.

FWIW Polymer is an effort by a completely different team and at this point is independent of Angular.

Facebook didn't abandon the virtual DOM approach with React Native, nor do they look at web as a second-class citizen. Rather React's approach could also be applied to native development, (wrapping the native stateful view hierarchy in a declarative model, which just happened to be in JavaScript) so that's what they did.

Angular is playing catch-up by adopting a similar rendering model. This will be to everyone's benefit.

Google is also pushing Polymer, but that's not really related to the other two.

You're mistaking companies for monolithic hive minds with a single opinion and goal shared across all groups and employees.

Google did not "decide Angular was the way to do web apps". In fact relative few public-facing apps are built with Angular compared to other proprietary frameworks. Likewise, Google has not "moved on to Polymer", though most of those of us working on Chrome think Web Components are the way to go.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com