from the all-the-better-to-track-you-with-my-dear dept.
Move over JavaScript: Back-end languages are coming to the front-end:
In the early days of networked computing, mainframes did all the heavy lifting: users connected to massive machines with video terminals that could do little more than send and receive text. Then in the 1970s, personal computers came along and made it possible to do serious computing on the client-side as servers handled tasks like authentication and storage in many networks. The rise of the internet in the 1990s swung the pendulum back to the server, with web browsers taking on a role not unlike terminals in the mainframe era.
The client-side made a come back over the past decade as developers built "single-page applications" (SPAs) with JavaScript. But a new crop of tools is sending the pendulum swinging back towards the server.
At the vanguard of these tools is Phoenix, a framework for the programming language Elixir, and a feature called LiveView. Using LiveView and a bit of JavaScript, developers can create browser-based interfaces for real-time applications like chat rooms or Twitter-style status updates. All UI elements are rendered on the server first and sent to the browser, ready-to-display. The only JavaScript required is a small amount of code that opens a WebSockets connection that handles sending input from the browser and receiving refreshed HTML/CSS from the server.
Phoenix isn't the first platform to offer a way for back-end developers to create front-end interfaces—Microsoft's ASP.NET Web Forms for Microsoft .NET existed back in 2002—but it did inspire many new tools. Caldara for Node.js, Livewire for the PHP framework Laravel, and StimulusReflex for Ruby on Rails, to name a few. Microsoft, meanwhile, released a new .NET feature called Blazor Server that modernizes the old Web Forms idea.
"My goal is not to get rid of single-page applications, but to obviate them for a large class of applications," Phoenix creator Chris McCord says.
There is a lot more in the full article.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Wednesday February 09 2022, @11:29PM (7 children)
Back in the mainframe era, there was a technical reason why lightweight display terminals connected to centralized big iron doing the work: the former was cheaper than the latter. But of course the real reason was that the large institutions that operated mainframes had absolute power over their users: power to decide what the user saw, could or could not do, when and for how much money.
Fast forward to today: nothing has changed. The Googles and Facebooks and Amazons and Akamais of today love nothing better than centralized applications they control entirely, dictate what you can and cannot do with, and use to collect monetizable data on you without your have any say whatsoever. "SaaS" they call it. My GenX ass calls it a deplorable regression.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by acid andy on Thursday February 10 2022, @12:15AM
Exactly, but it's worse than that. Today's average user's experience of installing software is when the website says "Get the app" and they dutifully install a glorified web client, to join the multitude of others already clogging up their mobile device. The trouble is that even though this "app" appears to the user (if they cared to stop and think about it) to have pretty much the same features that the web page had, they may not realize that it has none of the security and is likely doing a whole load of other nefarious things that are invisible to them. It makes me cringe. Thank fuck for FOSS.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 10 2022, @12:37AM (1 child)
Works while there is still room to grow.
When the market becomes saturated and the law of diminishing kicks in full force, they'll unload most of the processing cost back to you and your computer - their servers will just record what you've been doing, but it will be your CPU getting hot while actually doing it.
Watch out for the next swing. And save your old computers while you still have some control over them.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 10 2022, @05:46PM
I'm sure we'll eventually settle into a status quo where they keep just enough of the processing on their end that you have to connect to their servers to do much of anything. But, you still get to pay for most of the processing on your end.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 10 2022, @02:15PM
Now the users pay for the terminals, think they own the terminals and the hardware requirements for the terminals keep going up.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Thursday February 10 2022, @04:28PM (1 child)
The difference was back then they had to; computers cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and took an entire building to house, terminals hundreds of dollars. Today's computers are cheaper and smaller than terminals were back then.
However, as you say, The Googles and Facebooks and Amazons and Akamais of today love nothing better than centralized applications they control entirely. I say fuck 'em. I'll get something like Alexa when I can use it without an internet connection, just a connection to my local network. Most people have apps on their phones (today's computers) that are completely unnecessary, like news and weather apps. You don't need any app except a browser for news and weather. Same with radio station apps; they were once needed because tablets and phones didn't support what web sites used to stream, but now you can stream from their websites; the apps just give them your personal information they can sell to a third party.
Don't expect normals to know anything about computers, most don't know that their phone is just a computer with radios.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 10 2022, @05:48PM
Mycroft.ai is probably what you're looking for then. I've been toying with the idea of getting one, just because it allows me to control basically all of it. At least my phone requires that I hold down a specific button to enable the Google assistant to activate. No idea, whether it just suppresses responses if the button isn't pushed, or if it just doesn't listen unless I push the button. It's a shame that they screwed things up so badly that that's even a question.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 10 2022, @06:42PM
I think this is attributing to malice what can be better explained by economics.
The reason why things were centralized back then was exactly what you scoffed at: pure money and expense. When computers cost $50,000, it is economically impossible to give everybody their own computer. The marginal benefit for everybody having their own computer there was nowhere near enough to warrant it.
It's just like today. If you have $10 million (making up the number, no idea the real cost), you could privately make your own clone of a Facebook server farm. Of course you don't because you (1) don't have the money and (2) would see very little value in doing so.
Nobody was in a backroom twirling a mustache and thinking "Ahh! If we centralize the servers, we can prevent our researchers from spending their time collaborating and forming a union!" That very well could have been an incidental benefit some saw along the way, but it wasn't the primary reason.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 09 2022, @11:37PM (1 child)
Pretty much everything compiles to WASM, so you can use almost any language. Try to adblock and scrape my 20MB executable wrapped around 2 pictures and a few lines of text!
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Sunday February 20 2022, @01:20PM
Doesn't WASM have problems with tail-recursion optimisation?
Something about the way they maintain stack security?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 09 2022, @11:58PM (6 children)
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 10 2022, @12:37AM (3 children)
Isn't that called "Java?" ActionScript is a bunch of shit frankly. I wrote an app with it once, I regretted it instantly, and then its runtime got blackballed. I wonder if we'll ever find out how much Alphabet DBA Google paid Adobe to do that. Java is a decent language with an excellent free software ecosystem. Maven is a decent build system. It beats the pants off ActionScript (Flash), C# (Silverlight), MFC (ActiveX) ARGH MFC BURN IT WITH FIRE, and Javascript/HTML/CSS (current hotness).
I mean, the number one thing to hate about Java is ermagherd doesn't run on metal. If you want something truly cross platform, it won't run on metal. It'll run in a VM. Plus the goddess-awful java.util.Calendar has been finally deprecated by slightly-improved-JodaTime java.time.*. Java is the only language I know of with a standard library that now includes a correct and proper time library.
If applets made a comeback, you would probably even get complete support in independent browsers like Midori.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 10 2022, @01:59AM (1 child)
Java is bloatware. And why do you want to run on a bloated runtime? And worse, in a browser?
The only reason to use it, or a web browser, is for a gui. "oh look, cross platform!!!"
But how many platforms do you need to worry about?
If you're into mobile and want to sell apps, it's iOS. If you're into mobile and want to make your money via intrusive ads, it's Android. Pick one.
For desktops and laptops and everything else, it's either Windows or Apple. Pick one. The time and energy you waste making stuff cross-platform, you could instead be improving the one you picked.
Because NOBODY (the end user) gives two shits about cross platform. They have a platform and they're invested in it financially and emotionally.
Browser based apps? Why bother? You're just leaving money on the table.
Same with linux. Just no money to be made there.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 10 2022, @03:54PM
Web apps are not optimal (but what is), but they do run on everything. The GUI demands of something like a web discussion board like say Reddit or some real estate search app can be handled perfectly well by a web app. If you can either require a paid login or serve ads, you can get paid.
Then you only have to target chrome and safari.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 10 2022, @02:04AM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 10 2022, @12:40AM (1 child)
Are you serious? If so, go ahead and start that development already, not much time left. I might even throw some money on Patreon.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 10 2022, @12:50AM
https://opencollective.com/ruffle [opencollective.com]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by acid andy on Thursday February 10 2022, @01:25AM (2 children)
ISTR someone posting a link a little while ago to some FOSS privacy focused project that was to provide an alternative to upcoming browser technologies like future versions of Javascript or WebAssembly (or possibly some other tech I've forgotten), because they had concerns that the browser tech being pushed was getting even more intrusive. Anyone know what it was? I thought I bookmarked it but I'm not finding anything now.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 2, Interesting) by pTamok on Thursday February 10 2022, @07:39PM (1 child)
Might be this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol) [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Friday February 11 2022, @02:03AM
That's interesting. I really thought it was a technology for the existing web, such as a new Javascript engine, but I'm probably completely misremembering. I think I'll give up until I stumble across the original link or the new tech gets famous enough that everyone starts talking about it here. Unless I dreamt it.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 10 2022, @01:32AM
Move over Javascript [ client-side running scripts ]: Back-end languages [ we already have PHP and other frameworks, some monsters too ] are coming to the Front-end [ No, the back-end is the back end - some server in a dungeon; and the front-end is the front end - where the users' eyeballs are ].
This new thingy is another PHP .net .asp C# or something running on the SERVER. N.O.T. on my desktop browser or on someone's smartphone. There is a difference.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by ilsa on Thursday February 10 2022, @01:43AM (8 children)
IMO this can't come soon enough. Having javascript running on the backend was the second single stupidest idea the industry came up with, the first being keeping that undead language going in the first place.
Using crappy languages like Javascript directly contributes to the exponentially growing number of vulnerabilities hitting everybody.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 10 2022, @02:33AM (5 children)
FYI: Prototype-based programming [wikipedia.org].
Nothing wrong with it. Lua, Cecil, NewtonScript, Io, Ioke, MOO, REBOL and AHK
Is nothing wrong with the paradigm of "code is data" - you wouldn't call LISP a "crappy language... contributes to the exponentially growing number of vulnerabilities hitting everybody.", would you?
Or, conversely, would you blame lotsa crappy insecure applications coded in C/C++ on the language(s)?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 10 2022, @02:58AM
The incompatibilities back in the Netscape Vs IE days, general shittyness of DOM-0 and endless popups gave it a reputation it'll never shake. I still disable javascript in my browser, I don't think the language is inherently crap but so much JS code is. The .NET crowd couldn't understand a prototype based language and the hipster OSX crowd began churning out some of the most awful code I've ever read. The EMCAScript spec suffered as a result - see the recent mess of the fat arrow syntax. [mozilla.org] Needless syntatic-sugar for anonymous functions becomes a parsing bottleneck for humans attempting to read the code.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Thursday February 10 2022, @04:46PM (1 child)
I was always against mixing code and data. Dumbest computing idea since the invention of the computer in 1946. Microsoft invented it, didn't they?
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 10 2022, @11:53PM
Von Neumann invented the idea, which is named after him. IIRC, the first von Neumann architectured machine was built by the University of Manchester in the late 1940s. Pretty sure that predates Microsoft.
(Score: 2) by ilsa on Thursday February 10 2022, @05:59PM (1 child)
That is a fantastically strawman argument.
Have you never seen the Javascript WAT video? Javascript is _idiotic_. Javascript is the only language I know of that people have made _other_ languages for, for the express purpose of working around the absurd amount fail baked into it. Javascript 1 was written in less than a day, and people have been inexplicably wrapping it in duct tape ever since.
PHP is another example of a POS language that has caused far more harm than good with it's god-awful design decisions.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 11 2022, @02:54AM
I don't know what you are talking about and think you are way off base. One of the best designed languages that has never had to kluge around bad past decisions has always been real_php_current2. @problemswithPHP() doesn't show any errors! /sarcasm
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Thursday February 10 2022, @04:37PM (1 child)
Using crappy languages like Javascript directly contributes to the exponentially growing number of vulnerabilities hitting everybody.
So your answer to crappy insecure languages like javascript on the back end is to move them to the front end? Good luck with that. A crappy language is crappy whether it's on the client or server.
My sites used to use javascript, I may still use a tiny bit on a couple of pages to tell if it's a phone or a larger screen, but the code I used to need I no longer do, since what I needed javascript for, like mouseovers, is now covered in HTML. It won't be long until I'll be able to get rid of the javascript completely, as HTML itself will likely supplant it in the future. Note that your browser is an app on your phone or computer. Good luck replacing that!
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 2) by ilsa on Thursday February 10 2022, @06:04PM
No, my preference is to take it behind the barn and have it shot.
My 2nd preference is to at least put it back on the front end because that's where it originated and limits the pool of fail somewhat. The people that code javascript are the same people that think SQL is "too hard".
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 10 2022, @02:35AM (2 children)
Seriously?
Do they assume everyone has gigabit connectivity?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by mcgrew on Thursday February 10 2022, @04:50PM (1 child)
Unfortunately, yes, they do. And have for a quarter of a century. A few years ago I went shopping with my then newish laptop, on a 50 mpbs cable, and my little computer was too wimpy to display Staples' incredibly poorly written website.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Friday February 11 2022, @02:09AM
Anyone who builds a website that performs like that should be ashamed to call themselves a web developer (and yes I know in reality it will be poor decisions and time pressure from management, possibly outsourced to someone paid a pittance).
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Thursday February 10 2022, @03:19AM (16 children)
I just saw something about Witchcraft on Elixr or some such. I've been doing this stuff for money for 31 years now, is there any good reason to keep spinning new languages with cute names every 2 years? I mean, English has evolved over the past 1000 years or so, but it's still basically recognizable as English, at least for the last couple hundred years. So many of the ideas encapsulated in these new names could be impressed on existing languages as refinements and/or extensions - calling it a whole new language seems like the opposite of progress.
Unless we're still in the Papua New Guinea stage of development development? Hundreds of isolated tribes that don't have regular communication with each other? Shouldn't the advent of StackOverflow be slowing the language evolution the way that phonograph records, radio and TV standardized and crystalized modern language for the last 100 years?
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday February 10 2022, @04:13AM (3 children)
IIUC Elixir is a dialect of Erlang, or possibly "front end" would be a better description. And it's not new.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 10 2022, @09:16AM (2 children)
Elixir is not a dialect of Erlang. They have a couple of fundamental differences that will make the two forever incompatible. But they both use BEAM as their reference implementation's virtual machine. They have a lot of the same benefits and drawbacks because of that and the underlying "feel," for lack of a better word, is similar too. However, there are some large differences. Because Elixir is sort of the child of Erlang and Ruby, it is more flexible in how you write it (And thank goodness for the pipe operator) and is great for web-facing code. Because it has the benefit of hindsight, it also prevents problems that could arise in Erlang before they happen while the changes introduce problems of its own. Erlang, on the other hand, is more versatile because you can use it for more things thanks to its standard library and interfaces without relying on code flexibility to get there. Erlang also has other benefits Elixir doesn't because it was designed for different use cases, particularly in CPU-bound tasks.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 10 2022, @12:59PM (1 child)
IIRC, designed with lightweight threads for use in packet switching and routing. Erlang would be a contender for distributed caches and message queues but what is the advantage of BEAM for the use case of Elixir you're making?
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 11 2022, @12:13AM
Elixir was originally targeted for client/server architectures, for web applications, and similar constructs. Therefore its reference implementation was written with that in mind. The BEAM VM is great for that kind of workload because of its lightweight threads, distributed concurrency and fault-tolerant (let it crash) design, and soft RT capability. It is in many way similar to the "async" mania that swept through other languages. Except this implementation is mature, well-tested, and scales both directions insanely well. The problem is that because Elixir was written with the assumptions underlying those targeted use cases, it suffers in others. One of those where it really suffers is in tasks that are CPU-bound and not IO-bound. That isn't to say that it is forever a problem or completely intractable, but it is the cost-benefit analysis they made when designing it.
Perhaps I didn't answer your question, so feel free to rephrase it if I didn't.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 10 2022, @02:27PM (4 children)
From what I see we're at the stage of trying to build houses, skyscrapers etc on ever changing sand.
There's a very old parable on building houses on sand vs houses on rock. But hey there's more money to be made building on sand... Heck some even build on poop like PHP or Node.js.
For example .Net 3.5 SP1 EOLs in Jan 2029 (start Nov 19, 2007). But .Net Core 5 is EOL in May 2022 and .Net Core 6 is EOL on November 8, 2024
Java 17 (LTS) was available in September 2021 but EOLs in 2029 (premier support only till September 2026).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 10 2022, @03:57PM (3 children)
Oh come on. Java has one of the best backwards compatibility track records of any language out there.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 10 2022, @05:28PM (1 child)
That seems to be changing. I have a Java environment spread over servers, desktops and embedded devices. For the first 15 years, everything was fine. Now, with the exploding Java version numbers, I have to worry that the Java versions on the development boxes set (differing based on stable/oldstable) different minimum target levels, third party libraries having to be updated to support the Java on the newest development boxes, hoping compatibility remains on the embedded devices. And then there is the reorg of the Java internals I need to build native parts against.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 10 2022, @06:03PM
Then there's software like Crashplan that deliberately breaks compatibility on unsupported OSes rather than just not support them. There's really no reason why the GUI part of the program needs to be the part that doesn't work across platforms.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 10 2022, @11:15PM
Java the language has spectacular backwards compatibility, only a few things have ever been deprecated. (Most famously the Java Web Start in-browser tech.)
But old Java Runtime Environment / Java Virtual Machine releases were supported for decades. Now Oracle is evolving Java a lot faster, which is fine, but putting the JRE/JVM support cycles at much shorter. So instead of "Install JVM, apply occasional security updates, done." You have to "Install JVM, apply occasional security updates, upgrade JVM, apply occasional security updates, upgrade JVM again...." it's irritating, especially when there are breaking changes between versions. The move between JVM 7 and JVM 8 fixed a long standing Java bug in rounding floating point values, which broke hundreds of our automated tests.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 10 2022, @05:59PM
The nice thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from. I'd wager that the issue is partially ego and partially being too lazy to understand how to use the tools that exist. Occasionally, there are situations where the existing languages and tools legitimately can't be made to work reasonably in a given application, but at this point, I'm not sure there's any legitimate role that isn't already filled by something decent.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 10 2022, @06:55PM (5 children)
You wouldn't understand English from 200 years ago, mate!
(Score: 2, Informative) by pTamok on Thursday February 10 2022, @07:48PM (4 children)
Really?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1821_in_literature [wikipedia.org] - Sir Walter Scott: Ivanhoe
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1821_in_literature [wikipedia.org] - Percy Bysshe Shelley: Adonais
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1822_in_literature [wikipedia.org] - Thomas De Quincey: Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 11 2022, @12:00AM (3 children)
Even stuff like Chaucer is far overrated in difficulty. A moderately well-read individual will have little trouble, especially if they have some knowledge of Latin or it's descendents.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 11 2022, @03:19AM (1 child)
Chaucer's works are all transcribed into modern calligraphy/typesetting and translated to a much more modern but still anachronistic tone. Of course they aren't that difficult after someone else does the hard work for you.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 11 2022, @03:33AM
Sure, if you read shitty modern editions...
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Sunday February 20 2022, @01:38PM
Helps more if you know Dutch.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Thursday February 10 2022, @04:16PM (1 child)
Pages on my web site that require my visitors to download and maybe pay for tools that will let them visit my web site! I have two words:
Fuck that.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 4, Informative) by gawdonblue on Friday February 11 2022, @01:55AM
Not sure what you mean?
Elixir/Phoenix/LiveView is a webserver thing that serves up webpages with all of the logic (programming) running on the server. It does depend on the web browser supporting websockets and by default runs a small bit of javascript, but most recent browsers can do this. The server pre-renders any changes to the webpage and serves up just those changes. It is amazingly efficient on the client and surprisingly low-bandwidth.
Visitors' computers have to do far less with this than they do with those ridiculous piles of JS frameworks that many websites serve up, and they need no extra tools to visit your site.