This glazes over the torrent of poorly developed ideas you need to deal with in every organization.
580 karma · joined July 15, 2012
http://triskweline.de/unpoly2-slides/ http://triskweline.de/unpoly3-slides/
I'd say 95% of the apps we build are now based on Unpoly, the rest on React.
We now believe SPAs are not a good default for the type of apps we're building. We're still reaching for SPAs when requirements demand high-frequency user input and optimistic rendering, e.g. for a chat or online game.
YMMV!
The old demo app focused on the downsides of classic multi-page apps (MPAs), i.e. the reason the world moved to SPAs all these years ago. In an MPA clicking a link loses all transient state, like focus, scroll positions and unsaved form state. This can all be solved with updating fragments instead of full pages, while still keeping rendering logic on the server.
Unpoly takes special care to always move the focus to the next relevant element in an interaction. E.g. when a link updates a fragment, the focus is moved to that fragment. Or when an overlay is closed, focus is returned to the link that originally opened that overlay.
More details can be found here: http://triskweline.de/unpoly2-slides/#78
Feel free to install a screen reader and play with the demo app (https://demo.unpoly.com/).
What stopped us was not so much the lack of libraries, but programming ergonomics. E.g. when using keyword lists for function options, callers need to pass the keywords in the exact same order. Also mocking was difficult in tests.
Elixir is a great project with a friendly community, it just didn't work for us. YMMV so by all means try it out if you're interested!
spfjs lets you target multiple containers with a single update, e.g. in YouTube the video area and the sidebar with related content.
[1]: https://unpoly.com/
[1]: https://unpoly.com
The problem with test suites is that, as they grow and age, it becomes harder and harder to understand why tests are testing what they test. When a years old test fails because 5 is not 7, you cannot really fix it unless you understand why it was supposed to equal 7 in the first place.
Cucumber is a way to describe requirements at a higher level of abstraction. They provide rationale on top of mere assertions of behavior. This is worth the small overhead of writing step definitions.
I guess you can get the same by heavily commenting your tests. But you cannot enforce this easily in a team.
Happy to answer any questions you might have.
I built something similar a few years ago: https://hollyapp.com/
[1]: http://unpoly.com/
To give you an idea about what kind of juniority is attractive to a shop like ours: We run our own in-house internship program which takes 9 months. It requires CS degree plus some previous experience (private pet projects are OK) to enter.
The intern is paid living expenses and has vacation like other employees. The goal of the program is to hire the intern as a permanent junior developer after 9 months. Junior starting salary is also a far cry below 100K USD, but then again we don't have to live in San Francisco.
A task tracker / outliner with a Vim-like editing mode that I built for myself a few years back. It gained a lot of popularity through HN and Lifehacker.
I eventually rewrote the application and offered extra features and mobile support for paying subscribers. It now pays for date night with my wife.
We're just starting to get a some visibility internationally, which might explain why this is not all over Reddit and HN already.
Speaking of RCE: Distribution of new FriendNet versions was such a pain that for a while we considered a P2P auto-update mechanism where FriendNet users with newer versions would whisper Lua code to users with older versions, who would then eval() it locally.
It seemed like a much better idea then than it does today...
Legacy Android brwosers will become the next IE6 in terms of joy drained from our lives.
If you're persistent you will eventually get to "design" your own job, but that's some years down the road. If you want to concentrate on the things you are good at today, look for a nice 9-to-5 job at a company that matches your values and don't look back.