don’t get me wrong, I don’t mean to minimize that side, I just think there’s a fair argument to be made that direct control of peoples eyeballs are potentially, comparatively, much more powerful.
I’d love to find an alternative to xdotool’s auto type feature (or ClickPaste from Windows).
There is wtype but unfortunately it doesn’t work in KDE nor GNOME because neither of them support the right protocol. I’ve run into the “<DE> hasn’t implemented $PROTOCOL” a few times in the past and it’s certainly a bit annoying.
Aside from when that comes up, I don’t really have any complaints. A tool we used for work was never going to be fully functional on Wayland because of its dependence on Xinerama (I think) but thankfully we’ve moved away from it.
Oh that is perfect, thank you! Funnily enough, pasting into VNC sessions is exactly what I needed something like this for as well - you’ve taken a lot of future pain out of my workday!
The proliferation of libraries that exist only to fix the problems introduced by making everything an SPA is hilarious. Everything in web tech from the last decade is basically “there was an old lady who swallowed a fly”*.
I do think everything has its place. For example, you can do offline PWA with SPA since a page load doesn’t need a call to the server for rendering it. It also saves processing time/bandwidth by offloading the server from the burden of rendering the page. Once the page has loaded, the web app only needs data, not markup nor style. And last is that it is great since it only requires a browser without needing to write native apps in myriad of languages. Distributing and installing it is also not limited by the Apple/Google tax.
For clouds, there are certain workflows that can surely benefit from it. Maintaining your own infrastructure 24/7 with minimal downtime can be overwhelming for SMALL teams, especially one man show. Even more so when the product/web apps suddenly blows in popularity and now need to scale. Even more so when it is being DDoSed. The point is, many things can go wrong. And when you are deploying it for 24/7 use, down times can be costly. Deploying to cloud early and then slowly building towards on-premise after the team gets bigger is a viable route IMHO
And last is container devops. I think it also solves a lot of problems in multi-tenancy or even when running multiple services. Not everyone will use the latest-and-greatest version of a shared library. If the library is somehow conflicting with other tenants/service, you will have a bad time. Also, developing inside a container or virtual env can make testing and messing around safer since you didn’t affect your system installation.
For example, you can do offline PWA with SPA since a page load doesn’t need a call to the server for rendering it.
Client still needs to call the server. How offline PWAs work then? They emulate server in ServiceWorkers.
It also saves processing time/bandwidth by offloading the server from the burden of rendering the page.
Let’s call it page generation to not confuse with actual rendering.
It not always saves bandwidth and processing time, but static resources can allow to hide CDN latency on initial load. Although it is not property of SPAs, just separation of static and dynamyc part and generating dynamic part after static page already shows something.
It will still result in more requests, but may trasfer less data per request. May.
Once the page has loaded, the web app only needs data, not markup nor style.
Static web page after loading will not request more styles. SPAs imply client-side dynamic page, and they may request more data INCLUDING styles. Also client still need to load styles on page load.
And last is that it is great since it only requires a browser without needing to write native apps in myriad of languages.
Write for QT.
And when you are deploying it for 24/7 use, down times can be costly. Deploying to cloud early and then slowly building towards on-premise after the team gets bigger is a viable route IMHO
I guess so. Not everything can be offline-oriented.
Client still needs to call the server. How offline PWAs work then? They emulate server in ServiceWorkers.
Yes they do need server for initial resource loading. Usually with PWA, you need to fetch the static resource once from a CDN since every resource is bundled. And no, they don’t need to emulate server in service worker, wtf. You can if you want, but you can also store the data locally using indexeddb and sync periodically baked into the app. Service worker doesn’t emulate server, they just intercept a network call and check their cache. A man in the middle if you will. I think it is debatable if that is called emulating a server or not.
Let’s call it page generation to not confuse with actual rendering.
Yeah, that is fair. Its just the usual web tech shenanigans.
It not always saves bandwidth and processing time, but static resources can allow to hide CDN latency on initial load. Although it is not property of SPAs, just separation of static and dynamic part and generating dynamic part after static page already shows something.
When developing an application, you usually didn’t develop the dynamic and static part separately. Which data can be cached and which needs to be sent to the origin so it can be properly generated. If you fail to configure it correctly the static resource which should go to a CDN get sent to your origin instead. With SPA you just ship the frontend to the cdn and make the backend separately.
It will still result in more requests, but may trasfer less data per request. May.
I mean, if you are making an SPA without splitting the bundle, there should only be a single html, css, and js. A bunch of images and some font too if you want to be complete. But if you are making the page server generated, you always need to transmit the HTML. ALWAYS. So I think it definitely saves requests.
Static web page after loading will not request more styles. SPAs imply client-side dynamic page, and they may request more data INCLUDING styles. Also client still need to load styles on page load.
SPA will not request more style if you are bundling them tho? Wtf are you talking about? Unless you explicitly split the style, once SPA is loaded every page navigation is just JavaScript replacing the whole HTML with the one bundled in the JS file.
Write for QT.
Sure, QT exist as a UI library for cross platform. But that doesn’t solve the iOS mafia. We only got Apple to allow 3rd party store now, we haven’t got sideloading yet. It is a hassle if you want to make an app that can be used in any devices. Especially if the app is just some form filling app.
I would not be so sure. Maybe for a static web page this is possible. Outside of that I think people are kidding themselves. Writing code that might be stateless in isolation but relies on a database isn’t a stateless server imo, it’s just outsourcing state to another service.
With the SPA approach, you can have remarkably little state on the server because all the state associated with the user session lives on the frontend. The value of doing this obviously depends on the type application you’re making, but it can be a sensible approach in some cases.
Doesn’t SPA require polling the web server for more information? I feel like any website which retains information outside of the client device (like anything with a login page) would require state to be stored somewhere on the backend.
Typically, you just have a session cookie, and that doesn’t even need to be part of the app as auth can be handled by a separate proxy. The server just provides dumb data pull operations to the client in this setup, with all the session state living clientside.
That data has to be stored somewhere though. So you would still need some kind of database server to store it all or some other solution. That’s what I mean by outsourcing state. Data is still stored in the backend, just in a database rather than a web server.
There is data that gets persisted and needs to be stored somewhere, and then there’s the UI state that’s ephemeral. The amount of data that gets persisted tends to be small, and the logic around it is often trivial.
How am I being obtuse? You have been trying to trivialise the backend and now frontend as well. Backend isn’t just writing PHP or whatever, it’s setting up database servers, authentication proxies, and all that stuff. Not everything can be stateless.
I’m not trivializing anything here. What I actually said was that when all the UI logic lives on the frontend, then the backend just has dumb fetch and store operations along with an auth layer. In this scenario, the backend code can indeed be largely stateless. Specifically, it doesn’t care about the state of the user session or the UI. The only one trivializing things here is you by completely ignoring the nuance of what’s being explained to you.
The only nuances here seem to be: a) very simple websites need little state (but still aren’t stateless) and b) that you can move the state around to make something look stateless within a narrow view.
Evidently you don’t understand what people mean when they talk about stateless backend, so let me explain. The point there is regarding horizontal scaling. If your backend code is stateful then it has user context in memory, and requests for a particular user session have to be handled by the same instance of the service. With a stateless backend all the context lives on the client, and the requests can be handled by any instance on the backend. So now you can spin up as many instances of the service as you need, and you don’t need to care which one picks up the request. The fact that you might be persisting some data to the db in the process of handling the request is neither here nor there. Hope that helps you.
Yes that’s a stateless service but not a stateless backend. A backend to me is everything that doesn’t run on the client, including the database. Databases are not stateless, even distributed databases are not stateless. You can’t just spin up more databases without thinking about replication and consistency.
I’ve explained to you why the term exists, and why it matters. It refers specifically to application code in the context of horizontal scaling. Meanwhile, many popular databases do in fact allow you to do sharding in automated fashion. If you’re not aware of this, maybe time to learn a bit about databases.
Again. the goal is not to eliminate the statefullness of the whole stack. That’s just the straw man you keep arguing against. The goal is to remove context from the server. Once you get a bit more experience under your belt, you’ll understand why that’s useful.
The whole conversation was about backend being similar because you can write a stateless server. Have you forgotten? The issue here is a backend isn’t just one service, you can write a stateless service but you are in fact just moving the statefulness to the database server. The whole backend isn’t simpler than the front-end for that reason. It might be simpler for other reasons, though many popular websites need complex backends.
I am not arguing that a stateless service isn’t a useful concept. I get why people might want that. That’s not what this conversation is about. It’s about the backend vs frontend. Backend to me includes databases and other support services.
No, I have not forgotten. This whole conversation was me explaining to you the advantages of keeping the session context on the client. You are not moving statefulness to the database. The fact that you keep repeating this clearly demonstrates that you don’t understand what you’re talking about.
The statefulness lives on the client. Everything I said about the backend application also applies to the database itself. Any node in the db can pick up the work and store the value. The issue being solved is having everything tied to the state in a particular user session.
To explain it to you in a different way. There will be a certain amount of data that will need to be persisted regardless of the architecture. However, moving user state to the client means that the backend doesn’t have to worry about this. The fact that you’re having trouble grasping this really is incredible.
I don’t write web applications for a living and I especially don’t write front ends. I do have to ask though:
What information are you actually keeping in the front end or web server? Surely you don’t need any ephemeral state that isn’t already stored in the browser and/or for you like the URL or form details. Only thing I can think of is the session ID, and that’s normally a server side thing.
I mean I’ve written web sites where there is no JavaScript at all, and the server is stateless or close to it. It’s not a difficult thing to do even. All the actual information is in the database, the web server fetches it, embedds it into a HTML template, and sends it to the client. Client doesn’t store anything and neither does the server. Unless I really don’t understand what you mean by state. You might keep some of your server fetches data from another server using REST or SOAP but that’s only used once as well.
Well, I’ve been writing web apps for a living for the past 20 years or so, and I’ve written lots of full stack apps. There can be plenty of ephemeral state in a non-trivial UI. For example, I worked on a discharge summary app for a hospital at one time. The app had to aggregate data, such as patient demographics, medications, allergies, and so on from a bunch of different services. This data would need to be pulled gradually based on what the user was doing. All of the data that got pulled and entered by the user would represent the session state for the workflow. Maybe don’t trivialize something you admit having no experience with.
So you do include ephemeral state that’s a copy of database data? If we were including that then every non-static website has plenty of state, but so does every web server. Whatever definition you are using must be quite odd.
What kind of polling are we talking about? If you are talking about realtime data, SSE doesn’t solve that either. You need SSE or WebSocket for that (maybe even WebRTC). If what you mean is that every time the page is refreshed then the data is reloaded, it is no different than polling.
Sure, but that only gets you so far. I think it’s important to distinguish between document sites where the users mostly just views content, and actual applications like an email client or a calendar. The former can be easily handled with little to no frontend code, however the latter tend to need non trivial amount of UI state management.
lemmy.ml
Newest