Stories
Tagged with opinion
The Reports of the Death of JavaScript are Greatly Exaggerated
Not John BoltonThe notorious quip by Mark Twain came to mind today as I was reviewing comments to my recent blog post about Blazor, a lot of the comments talked about WebAssembly being the death of JavaScript.
The fact is that we've all been here before. In fact, we've been here many times. And I, for one, don't want to simply see WebAssembly as something to replace JavaScript. Here are my thoughts.
So I've been in software development for over thirty years (I know, i'm old). And my experience with web development started about twenty years ago. So I've seen a lot of solutions to avoiding client-side development with Scripting Languages come and go. Here's a short list:
Single Page Applications? Bah Humbug!
I know that the title of this post may be a bit of link bait, sorry about that. But having been in this business quite a while now, I am noticing a trend. A trend that worries me.
The Single Page Application (or SPA) moniker is one I’ve always disliked (as you’d know if you follow me on Twitter). But it’s not the technology I have a problem with, it’s the moniker and the implications of the moniker.
I started doing web development in the ‘90s on ASP (no, not ASP.NET). This was a treasure trove of open database connections, imported headers, and clunky HTML. I never thought we’d get to where the web was a mature platform to develop upon. In the past few years, technologies like Knockout, AngularJS, BackboneJS and the like have all contributed to a richer client-side experience. No longer were we dependent on post-backs or page requests to get the job done. Things are good. They are really good.
HTML5, XAML and Declarative User Interfaces
At the suggestion of Tim Heuer this week, I took a break from writing my Windows Phone 7 book to delve into HTML5 a bit. I wanted to see what was different and how it would possibly impact Rich Internet Applications (RIA).
I did a couple of HTML5 tutorials which include the new tags that I think will be really cool (like <nav/>, <article/>, etc.) for traditional web design. I think the <datagrid /> and <datatemplate /> tags are interesting but unsure about how they'll be implemented. I also very interested in the local storage story, but it feels a long way from full implementation. But I don't want to talk about the entire HTML5 stack as I am just scratching the surface.