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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.
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(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.