Electron considered harmful

Re:Electron considered harmful by ChuckMcM on Thursday November 24, 2016 @01:19PM (#13031821)

   "Electron is a really good fit: for example, shipping a
    single-page webapp as a desktop app, a need that
    surfaces often in today's world, despite his derision
    of this concept."

From a systems perspective that is emminently rant worthy, it indicates the system has completely failed the developer who cannot easily express what they can in a single page web app as a real application in the system.

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Re:Electron considered harmful by jeremiep on Thursday November 24, 2016 @01:29PM (#13031891)

Not at all. It simply indicates the system has a radically different interface than the web. And that web APIs have evolved incredibly more than system ones when it comes to building quality UX.

Its no wonder all the best native applications ALL use proprietary toolkits. Adobe being a prime example. Such a toolkit is orders of magnitude easier to reproduce in HTML/CSS than it is in any of Qt/GTK/wx and others.

Thinking a web app can easily be expressed as a systems application grossly overlooks the complexity web apps have scaled to.

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Re:Electron considered harmful by nilliams on Thursday November 24, 2016 @01:25PM (#13031867)

Yep, all the native toolkits failed, that's worthy of ranting about, but that is not what OP was doing.

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Re:Electron considered harmful by m_fayer on Thursday November 24, 2016 @02:14PM (#13032173)

The only native toolkit I've ever tried that I thought could compete with web is wpf. It was slow and cludgy but way ahead of its time, and the web is only now starting to approach its power.

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Re:Electron considered harmful by sixbrx on Thursday November 24, 2016 @02:30PM (#13032254)

I think WPF is nice but has actually fallen behind a bit on binding vs. some of the web toolkits like React/Redux, Angular 2, Ember.

It's been a while since I messed with it, but MVVM didn't work so well for some kinds of things, which seemed to be why for example selected items property is often not a dependency property of MS supplied widgets (so can't be participate in binding). For example see http://stackoverflow.com/questions/22868445/wpf-binding-sele... (from what I remember this accepted solution also has a subtle bug of double notification (or was it lack of notification on one side?)).

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Re:Electron considered harmful by mwcampbell on Thursday November 24, 2016 @05:35PM (#13033223)

Perhaps WPF was the Electron of its time, in terms of being a resource hog. I remember how one particular WPF-based application hastened the obsolescence of my brother's laptop some years ago. [1]

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8444494

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Re:Electron considered harmful by ivm on Thursday November 24, 2016 @03:52PM (#13032681)

I can't see how Cocoa failed at anything.

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Re:Electron considered harmful by nilliams on Thursday November 24, 2016 @04:00PM (#13032725)

> I can't see how Cocoa failed at anything.

Will my Cocoa app run on Windows, Linux and the web?

(A well-designed web app built with Electron will).

Why should any company that wants their product to be widely available invest in Cocoa developers?

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Re:Electron considered harmful by ivm on Thursday November 24, 2016 @08:14PM (#13033814)

Why should it? It focuses on its platform and does it well.

I prefer native Mac apps to cross-platform ones. Serious companies should build native apps and keep UX guidelines of each platform in mind.

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Re:Electron considered harmful by nilliams on Friday November 25, 2016 @11:25AM (#13037775)

Building an app once for each platform is not economically viable for a lot of teams, 'serious' or otherwise.

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Re:Electron considered harmful by ivm on Friday November 25, 2016 @02:24PM (#13039184)

Yes, but it's not Cocoa's problem.

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Re:Electron considered harmful by nilliams on Monday November 28, 2016 @03:12AM (#13054107)

It's Cocoa's problem because people stop using it for that reason. A toolkit no-one uses is a failure.

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Re:Electron considered harmful by ivm on Monday November 28, 2016 @05:12PM (#13058870)

It's doing well - I currently have 2 Electron apps and dozens of Cocoa apps on my Mac. :)

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Re:Electron considered harmful by nilliams on Monday November 28, 2016 @05:42PM (#13059080)

We're talking about dev mindshare today. What you have installed is irrelevant.

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Re:Electron considered harmful by ivm on Tuesday November 29, 2016 @01:14PM (#13064898)

I bet that 20-25% of desktop apps on Mac will use Electron in the next 5-7 years.

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Re:Electron considered harmful by sintaxi on Thursday November 24, 2016 @02:19PM (#13032200)

Make no mistake, system-platforms failed.

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