Re:What if serverless meant no backend servers?
by pulse7 on Tuesday January 23, 2024 @04:09PM
(#39109878)
...and if this "desktop application" sometimes communicates with the server it should not be called a "fat client" and it's architecture should not be called "client-server", because those words aren't fancy anymore...
Re:What if serverless meant no backend servers?
by juunpp on Tuesday January 23, 2024 @03:59PM
(#39109729)
Does the author realize they just re-invented an ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of a native desktop application?
Re:What if serverless meant no backend servers?
by cortesoft on Tuesday January 23, 2024 @04:08PM
(#39109874)
I mean, it is basically Electron
Re:What if serverless meant no backend servers?
by _factor on Tuesday January 23, 2024 @04:01PM
(#39109766)
It really is mind-boggling the path we’ve taken.
If only mobile phones hadn’t had been so slow when running jvm and flash when they first came out, we might be writing java and flash web apps in NodeJF by today.
Re:What if serverless meant no backend servers?
by Spivak on Tuesday January 23, 2024 @04:25PM
(#39110083)
This is really the fault of the literally zero cooperation between os vendors to make it possible to run non-native apps (i.e. apps that are the same everywhere not an app that's windows-like on Windows and mac-like on Mac) that can look like anything a designer can draw. So the instant someone assembled the bits of course it took off like wildfire even if it's otherwise suboptimal in every way. Someone finally made the thing devs actually want out of a cross-platform sdk instead of yet-another-rigid-widget-toolkit.
"fuck your platform" or less crass "your platform is just one of my delivery vectors" could be the 2015 on mantra for appdev.
Game engines mostly get this right too. You get a rectangle to render everything from scratch and enough abstractions where interacting with the OS directly is a rare occurrence.
Re:What if serverless meant no backend servers?
by plagiarist on Tuesday January 23, 2024 @04:20PM
(#39110018)
I don't know about this idea. How would I turn this "Java" off when their subscription runs out?
Re:What if serverless meant no backend servers?
by PlatinumBench on Tuesday January 23, 2024 @04:03PM
(#39109794)
That's all well and good but how am I supposed to track users, serve them 100 ads, waste their time/resources, and ruin their experience all at the same time?? These desktop applications sound terrible, think of the marketing loss! /s
Porting this type of application could take a lot of work! So at some point, somebody invented a programming language called Java, which used a thing called a Virtual Machine, so that one application could run the same way on any computer that could run the Java Virtual Machine. They called this A Portable Desktop Application.
Unfortunately, this obscure language was somewhat difficult to use, so this paradigm was abandoned for simpler languages, and with it, so went the idea of A Portable Desktop Application.
Decades later, somebody reinvented the idea. But it required a much more limited application platform, running inside a kind of hacked-together document viewer, with a simplistic programming language designed to control how documents were displayed. It took about 1000x as much memory and CPU, but, with addition of about 50 different frameworks and 30 different new custom APIs, you could finally get close to the same functionality as the first solution.
Ah, technological progress...