Delphi lapping the web has less to do with delphi and more to do with the web. Web development sucks and all the frameworks and javascript engines and css preprocessors are just plaster and paint over that fundamentally broken structure.

Right. Because the web is fundamentally a document delivery system that has, due to its easy interface and popularity, grown far from those roots.

I do wonder what would happen if modern adaptive development practices ("agile") were coupled with older high productivity dev platforms like Delphi. I suspect it'd be a good combination.

Disagree -- the web platform itself is pretty solid. Websites made decades ago are still accessible. The tooling that exists today will probably last much shorter.

Right. Apart from Flash, Java applets, and the old MS alternative. Those websites aren't accessible in practice, the technologies they're based on are dead or dying.

Those weren't accessible to begin with, not even back then :)

CSS preprocessors is something I don't want to get into (ex web dev jack of trades 5 legged pony): install gulp, node, npm, git pull, etc. just to build/compile a stylesheet ? Erk. So now I have to work around CSS hacks and the processing quirks, etc. /ranting

Delphi developer here - nice to be noticed :-)

Still thinking about moving to the fire monkey framework but no need to rush these things

As long as last year's darling framework ain't ExtJs...

Question: what's wrong with ExtJS. Granted, I haven't used it in several years and at the time found that it produced a lot of difficult to track down bugs, but at the same time it seemed like a reasonable choice for a certain type of app. If you need to build something that emulated a desktop app in the browser, say for an internal dashboard, why would Ext be a bad choice today?

The last time I used ExtJS was a few years ago, so it may have changed but: Its tables all the way down. Horrible html generated from a really clunky declarative library. If you only ever _just_ want to make a windows 2000 deskop-like experience for older browsers, than yes it is serviceable. Also very painful to extend / create custom work when you're dealing with that level of nesting. ExtJS solves an old problem that you very likely will not run in to today. Better to use modern-ish libraries and use SASS or LESS to get that good 'ol early 2000s desktop look.

ExtJS has two modes, modern mode is based on sencha touch and uses CSS-based layout, classic mode is based on the older ExtJS rendering model and uses tables for layout. You get a richer feature set in classic mode, but the end goal is to achieve parity and then phase it out.

They're a pretty isolated eco system, although it seems they're working to improve that. Right now they use their own ant-based build system, have their own ES6-incompatible class system and you're pretty far removed from HTML/CSS. So it's really hard to leverage "regular" JS frontend skills there.

Which might be fine if the system would work properly, as Ext would not directly compete with more "bare metal" component systems, but work as some kind of browser-based GUI DSL (which was what got a lot of people into it back in the days when DHTML was young).

Sadly, they seem more focused on introducing new features than fixing bugs or making all those elements work together (recent example: Conflict between new two-way binding and old statefulness of grid column sorting/order/filtering).

Mindshare isn't as good as with almost any other lib (some guy had the same problem you have with 6.2 with version 3.4, no solution ever posted), and due to it not being open source, there's not exactly a large community working on it, fixing things, adding new components etc.

And for all that, you have to pay a pretty stiff fee.

ExtJS was never the pretty/handsome prom date.

Backbone all day.

We pulled a Backbone app up out of storage along with some others. Then we wrote a few more versions in modern frameworks. It's an internal comparison app. Two things of note. 1) We always start from the Backbone app, it's the easiest to convert to other frameworks. 2) It ran right out of the box, no problems. No library muck and no fixes. That being said I did eventually move on to writing new stuff in Angular2x, but I stand by Backbone as good and reliable.

Literally this. It still does everything I need and not a thing more and is entirely grokable whilst being extendable. Amazing little piece of software.

Agreed here. Backbone is brilliant, and minimal.

Check out the annotated source here: http://backbonejs.org/docs/backbone.html

I trip out every time I look at the source of it and Underscore. There's nothing there, it's all so simple, it's like the bare minimum amount of code that can be there to do the things it does.

Backbone aka. Memory leaks as a service

Which is the reason Marionette exists in the first place (well that and boilerplate code).

If you create a bunch of stuff then don't dereference/unlink/whatever you want to call it in JS-land it you're going to have a bunch of references to stuff laying around. I don't fault Backbone for that.

Yeah, I cut my teeth on Backbone and I'm super glad for the experience. And as git-pull mentioned, the source code is nicely annotated (and concise), so it makes debugging easy.

Udacity teaches Knockout as their front-end framework in their Front-End Nanodegree. I would guess it's because it's extremely simple to learn (no Babel or anything) yet also very powerful in teaching code organization concepts (such as ViewModel).

It certainly isn't "modern," and doing anything remotely complicated will have you clawing at your eyes, but Udacity teaches it not as a framework to use, but as a framework to learn from. If I hadn't learned the basics of code organization by creating a simple app from Knockout, I'd be writing a _lot_ of logic in the render function of my React components (rather than computing them in a `mapStateToProps` selector), and I see a lot of beginner programmers do this.

Not to say that React is _bad_ for a beginner to learn, but it makes it very easy to do things the wrong way without letting you know it's wrong. With Knockout, you literally _can't_ put any logic in the View layer without it looking ugly, which is a beautiful pattern for a beginner.

> In my experience using last year's darling framework instead of this year's is an excellent way to go. The codebase is stable and full-featured, the plugin ecosystem is rich, the documentation is extensive, and stackoverflow is already filled with accepted answers.

I'm slowly coming round to the idea of committing to Angular for these reasons, just as HN commenters seem to be increasingly talking about React as the current Big Thing.

React and Angular1 are the same age :).