My personal criticism of the web FE community is not that the tools haven’t solved problems, it’s that these problems have been solved before and that is not acknowledged.
For example, a single-page app is the exact same thing as a native frontend. It’s a stateful, long-running process that communicates with a backend. This is not a new paradigm, but it is treated as one in the web community.
Another example is declarative UI. Microsoft had XAML and data binding well before Backbone, Angular, and React.
I personally love where web UI is at today, but I get the sense that we think it’s full of these unique problems when it’s really not.
Xaml was released two years before Backbone, and only
five years before React. It’s a contemporary of those efforts not a predecessor.
And according to the ECIS, it was created in part as a poison pill for the web UI platform. Not sure if you were around in the early part of the web’s history but Microsoft had a demonstrated pattern of using pseudo-standards to destroy competitors.
But I guess, I am left unsure of what you’re suggesting. That Facebook should have ported XAML to the web instead of creating React? That would have been... faster? Better?
For example, a single-page app is the exact same thing as a native frontend. It’s a stateful, long-running process that communicates with a backend. This is not a new paradigm, but it is treated as one in the web community.
Another example is declarative UI. Microsoft had XAML and data binding well before Backbone, Angular, and React.
I personally love where web UI is at today, but I get the sense that we think it’s full of these unique problems when it’s really not.