

Where is the web’s Loren Brichter?  - jtaby
http://tomdale.net/2011/05/an-uphill-battle/

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PaulHoule
For CRUD and other common business apps I think you can be more productive
developing web apps than you can be developing native apps.

It happened without people being conscious of it, and enterprise 'architects'
are always trying to undo it, but the standard model webapp that has a
stateless front end that keeps all persistent information in a database has a
number of advantages over the 'tangle of pointers' architecture that native
apps have. 'tangle of pointers' applications inevitable have failures of
memory management that, like cancer, will take the application down if it runs
long enough. Even if you don't think about it, webapps force you to have an
engineered application state.

There certainly isn't anything like Visual Basic for the web but Ruby on Rails
and all of the modern frameworks that imitate it make it easy to pound CRUD
apps out fast.

If you want to do something that doesn't fit into the CRUD model, if you feel
like you need a fancy interface, or if you do AJAX for the sake of AJAX, then
you might be more productive writing native apps.

AJAX for AJAX sake is a particularly serious web antipattern. I must admit I
take delight when my competitors develop AJAX-heavy web sites that are like
Romulan Cloaking Devices so far as Google is concerned. I get free traffic
from search engines and they get nothing... Even though they're smart people
who've worked even harder than I have.

To be fair, there are answers to the AJAX 'complexity barrier' that people run
into because of the difficulty of choreographing asynchronous communications.
Unfortunately nobody has written much about them because those of us who could
are either busy doing it or have reached the conclusion that front-end
development is lame.

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fizx
Blame IE6.

Web developers spend an inordinate amount of time doing cross-platform
testing, and they don't use the best technology possible, because they will
need to think about how it degrades.

Also, Loren, amazing as he is, didn't put together his backend. That took tens
of engineers, millions of dollars, and a lot of time.

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tealtan
Because you have to deal with multiple browsers, some of which are still in
the stone age. Because you have to be mindful of loading times. Because you
don't have access to the system's full processing power, just what the browser
gives you. Because you don't get pixel-perfect control.

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VMG
Loren Brichter seems to be an iOS app developer?

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spatulon
Yes. Brichter wrote Tweetie, which became the official Twitter client for iOS
and Mac. With the iOS version he invented the intuitive and widely copied
"pull to update" mechanism.

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tehdik
Perhaps it'll soon be Joe Hewitt.

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bobspryn
That's something I would definitely bet on (likely).

