News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Web vs. native: let’s concede defeat by 72deluxe on Tuesday May 26, 2015 @07:12AM (#9603953)
Developing for native does not always take twice as long. I would write a desktop C++ app faster than attempting to write a web app and wrap it in desktop runtime capability.

If you're not used to writing desktops apps, yes it will take longer.

Re:Web vs. native: let’s concede defeat by moonchrome on Tuesday May 26, 2015 @08:04AM (#9604175)
I recently needed to build an internal GUI app - after seeing how much time it will take me to get a HTML client/server set up I looked around for a GUI framework in Python and I was thrilled when I found : https://python-gtk-3-tutorial.readthedocs.org/en/latest/

With Glade + Python 3 I was chucking out GUI code faster than the Visual Studio + Win Forms because there was no compile step. No over engineered MVVM ala C#/WPF for a simple app - load a glade layout file, hook up callbacks - bam everything works together. The MVC is already there because the content pipeline (model) is already separated and views are defined in glade files. I had a prototype functional by the end of the day - it would take me that much just to choose which tools to use if I went Javascript client/Python server.

Seriously - couldn't believe how fast you could get stuff done with it - everything works as expected, you get all the controls you need - no need to learn random stuff like that qtscript, no build process (this is actually huge !), insanely fast iteration (faster than web-dev). I always thought of GTK like some obscure C gui lib but the Python wrapper makes it very usable.

My only complaint so far is that Glade seems to be getting progressively slower as you remove/add stuff so you need to restart it from time to time (eg. once per hour) but it starts instantly so it's not really an issue.

Note : I haven't yet tried to get it running on Windows or OSX since we all use Linux internally.

Re:Web vs. native: let’s concede defeat by pjmlp on Tuesday May 26, 2015 @08:19AM (#9604256)
Pretty much this.

Anyone that has ever used RAD tooling for GUI applications can easily see how the HTML/CSS/JavaScript combo tooling is still miles behind from a 90's desktop developer experience.