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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: 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.
It is a disgrace that the richest nation in the world has hunger and homelessness.
(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.