D Web Services Application Potential?

via Digitalmars-d digitalmars-d at puremagic.com
Fri Jul 31 00:37:16 PDT 2015


On Thursday, 30 July 2015 at 14:13:53 UTC, Brandon Ragland wrote:
> This might be true, but then you're boiling down the whole 
> reason JavaScript took off: Frameworks. JavaScript is a 
> horrendous language to use, unless you throw some common 
> framework at it that attempts to unify all the browser quirks 
> into easy APIs, such as jQuery or Mootools.

Javascript is never going to be great, but it is "ok" if you 
approach it like you would approach C and use the Closure 
compiler with type annotations. Closure does a reasonable job of 
constant folding and inlining. Of course, some tricks like 
coercing numbers to int by "x|0" are a bit annoying to type.

Typescript 1.5 is a lot more convenient than plain javascript. It 
emulates some ES6 syntax like proper foreach "for(var e of 
somearray)" and provides typed interfaces and more usual 
OO-inheritance. I am looking forward to Angular2 which is written 
in Typescript.

Browser quirk libraries no longer have merits IMO. For many 
projects IE8 is out, IE9 is becoming obsolete and IE10 is quickly 
replaced by IE11. MDN and caniuseit documents browser support 
fairly well.

> JavaScript was never designed to be a language to run games or 
> high-performance software with.

Yes, also writing games on the web is difficult as the GPU 
capabilities varies a lot.

> Any language can be optimized more heavily if we throw the 
> framework(s) out. However, your development time sky-rockets. 
> In today's moving world, companies simply don't have time for 
> that. Thus the end result: bloated web pages that stall and lag 
> due to un-optimized framework heavy JavaScript.

I think one of the problems with webdev is that 
customers/superiors are lead to expect a lot less development 
time than for native. I sometimes think that the relative 
effortless creation of HTML webpage or setting up a WordPress 
site has a negative effect on expectations for web app 
development.




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