First there was the native client era on desktops that involved twiddling around with swt, gtk, qt and windows programming.
Then came the advent of webapps with more uniform abstractions of client side js frameworks and css3 and dozens of toolkits and decorators around these.
Then came the mobile era with a new breed of native v/s web applications. Nowadays, the general opinion I hear is that no one really likes webapps on mobiles. But we as a community actively are trying to port over the abstractions of css/js frameworks to native mobile so that developers can continue being comfortable while programming devices that function at the whim of Apple and Google.
I wish there were a timeline of sorts of all the paradigm shifts that programming user experiences has undergone over the last decade.
I think it's a shame that something as as unambiguous and nice to work with as, say, the Cocoa framework and MVC (using that example because of familiarity), was available for us web developers without trying to shoehorn it into javascript and the browser environment.
Having had a taste of native app development, it makes client side web development comparatively frustrating. We're continuously getting new features but little in the way of a more satisfying environment that can help bring all these parts together.
This is what makes me nowadays prefer work on native every time I am given the opportunity to do so.
Too many crazy web projects trying to shoehorn the desktop experience into the browser in a way that has to work the same across multiple browsers and operating systems, which leads to CSS/HTML/JavaScript hacks everywhere, with some customers discussing designs down to the pixel level.
Have you heard of Cappuccino? It's Cocoa for the web. You don't write javascript, you write Objective-J. It's pretty awesome. As a mac developer, I was immediately able to jump in and do cool stuff with it.
I'm not sure what the current state of the framework is, since the company that made it has been acquired, but it sure was a cool idea.
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This is a great product.
First there was the native client era on desktops that involved twiddling around with swt, gtk, qt and windows programming.
Then came the advent of webapps with more uniform abstractions of client side js frameworks and css3 and dozens of toolkits and decorators around these.
Then came the mobile era with a new breed of native v/s web applications. Nowadays, the general opinion I hear is that no one really likes webapps on mobiles. But we as a community actively are trying to port over the abstractions of css/js frameworks to native mobile so that developers can continue being comfortable while programming devices that function at the whim of Apple and Google.
I wish there were a timeline of sorts of all the paradigm shifts that programming user experiences has undergone over the last decade.
I think it's a shame that something as as unambiguous and nice to work with as, say, the Cocoa framework and MVC (using that example because of familiarity), was available for us web developers without trying to shoehorn it into javascript and the browser environment.
Having had a taste of native app development, it makes client side web development comparatively frustrating. We're continuously getting new features but little in the way of a more satisfying environment that can help bring all these parts together.
This is what makes me nowadays prefer work on native every time I am given the opportunity to do so.
Too many crazy web projects trying to shoehorn the desktop experience into the browser in a way that has to work the same across multiple browsers and operating systems, which leads to CSS/HTML/JavaScript hacks everywhere, with some customers discussing designs down to the pixel level.
Have you heard of Cappuccino? It's Cocoa for the web. You don't write javascript, you write Objective-J. It's pretty awesome. As a mac developer, I was immediately able to jump in and do cool stuff with it.
I'm not sure what the current state of the framework is, since the company that made it has been acquired, but it sure was a cool idea.
http://www.cappuccino-project.org/