I just wish there was a way to fast forward 2 years into a 10k LOC project to find out what new problems this creates. After running after the new hotness in technology for the last 5 years, I've realised it's never about the problems it solves today. It's the shit that you have to maintain a couple of years down the line.
(Not saying that this is bad -- just a random rant)
Mithril is a tremendous little framework, and Leo has done an exemplary job of writing it, documenting it and blogging about usage patterns and tricks. While declining frequent requests that he cram more functionality into its core, he takes the time to explain the trade-offs, showing a deep understanding of the problem space which gives me confidence to build upon his work. So thanks Leo!
Hopefully, in time, more people will realise the "zen" of mithril's minimal approach. In the meantime, interested readers can check out lichess.org, which recently rewrote its impressive UI using mithril.
I work at a coding bootcamp and we recently used Mithril to teach one of our JS units. I was skeptical at first that it would be properly understood by novice developers... boy was I wrong.
Mithril is an awesome framework. A breath of fresh air really.
I did a quick tweak of React's JSX transpiler to output mithril-compatible code [1], as the above was the sort of syntax I was using JSX to get away from!
I think it starts to look like HAML / Slim / Jade once you use CoffeeScript. Understandably not for everyone, but I quite like it, and it doesn't mess with your syntax highlighting like JSX does.
m "body",
m "input"
m "button", "Add"
m "table",
m "tr",
m "td",
m "input[type=checkbox]"
m "td", "task description"
Mithril is roughly equal in scope to Knockout+Sammy. The small gap between what most frameworks call "bidirectional data binding" and what it actually is in terms of vanilla js can be bridged with simple functions (I talk about that in a slightly more advanced context here: http://lhorie.github.io/mithril-blog/asymmetrical-data-bindi... ).
Dependency tracking can refer to two things: tracking changes for the purpose of updating the DOM (which Mithril does handle, albeit in a different way), or computed properties (which I personally think are not a good idea, but that you could do w/ an observable library from microjs)
I tried GWT years ago. It worked amazingly well, and let me write web apps in a real language. But it was significantly slower to develop a new site in GWT vs. plain vanilla HTML + CSS + JavaScript, and the speed to get up and running eventually seduced me away.
Now I'm considering going back and giving it another try. It takes more time to get up and running with GWT, sure, but the stuff you do write with it is written in... well... a real language with types and good tooling and real design patterns. The result is an application you can maintain and build upon for a long period of time rather than a heap of web cruft that collapses quickly under its own weight.
I know it's not sexy, but I've had the same experience you've had with "sexy." I'm becoming generally disillusioned with weakly typed and even dynamically typed languages -- they're fast to write but hard to maintain over long periods of time.
You should also look at Dart. It has a very fast iteration cycle and is a much nicer language that Java (in my very biased opinion - I worked on Dart).
I echo your sentiments about disillusionment with weakly typed/dynamically typed languages and I still haven't really reached a situation where I was glad I didn't have a type system backing me.
I used GWT for a few years on two projects, but I would not use it on any future projects. The first was using GXT, which you should probably avoid for public facing sites.
We ran into some GWT compilation issues mainly due to code size a couple of times with some browsers, like Safari, that left us dead in the water until Google released an update.
The second project used vanilla GWT and we were very happy with how performant it was. But we avoided lots of GWT features which seem over-engineered and complicated. We used JSON overlay types instead of RPC calls (which made our compilation / or dev mode much faster - I forget honestly). We avoided MVP, because I never met anyone who actually fully understood MVP with GWT. Instead, we had a very simple MVC structure that worked great for us (but lacked unit tests..). We avoided most of the CSS features because the complexity/value wasn't favorable for us.
Moved on to a JS project afterwards and it was a breath of fresh air.
I'm a Java developer (and it might shock people, but I like it), where I work we're still stuck with good ol' Struts, it works, and a big international corporation uses this system.
But comparing a functional scripting language with a object-oriented statically-typed pre-compiled language, arguing one is better than the other, does not make sense to me.
You can easily revert the situation and say that static typing is a weakness of java, and it's poor fucntional (until before v8) capability is a drawback and a strong point for Javascript.
I'm not into the JS world so I can't say anything about the tooling, but yes, Java's tooling and ecosystem is an extremely strong point.
My complaint is about dismissing Javascript as not a "real language" while it's got A LOT going for it.
EDIT: I also worked with GWT (GXT from ExtJs, actually) in 2011-2012, and it was really nice. I miss it.
On the one hand I wish that the docs for these projects could speak to those concerns, but on the other hand I'm not even sure how they would do that successfully. When something is this young it just takes time to figure out how it's going to survive and be maintained.
I remember the days of using prototype.js over jquery. If only someone could have saved me the time.
> I remember the days of using prototype.js over jquery. If only someone could have saved me the time.
There was plenty of criticism from the JS world when Prototype came out, and the main issue everyone had was how Prototype attempted to shoehorn classical OOP into JavaScript (hence, the abuse of prototypes and fake class inheritance), which is a mistake amateur JS developers make to this day. jQuery has at least made it so using the most popular DOM abstraction framework didn't also mean you were running less-than-ideal code inherently, but developers still manage to mess this one up.
I think it's because when you learn how to program, you only learn the classical style, so you're not ready for the pitfalls of prototypal inheritance. So a lot of developers go through the "phase" of attempting to retro-fit their own ideas of how programming should work into a language that is designed in a totally different way, inevitably lead to problems, and have "the revelation" of understanding the prototypal inheritance idea. It's kind-of like a growing pain, which is why I'm really happy JS is being taught more heavily in schools and especially to entry-level programmers. Unlike Java, JavaScript is more accessible (just pop open the REPL in any browser) and its results are easier to observe. While it's not a great tool to teach people the concepts of OOP, I think it's very useful to teach kids at a young age that there isn't just one way to do things. They're different enough to screw developers up on a day-to-day basis, but not different enough that spending a few weeks with the language isn't enough to grasp its power.
As others have said, you really didn't waste your time there. If anything, it was simply a matter of JS developers collectively and simultaneously going through the same growing pains and eventual realizations about how the language works.
While it's not a great tool to teach people the concepts of OOP...
I actually think it's a very good tool for teaching OOP. It doesn't have types to confuse the issue, it favours composition over inheritance by design, and it fully encapsulates state.
You could do much worse than JS as a teaching language. In fact, I'd say that it was only through practical application in JS that I fully appreciated the concepts extolled by Smalltalk, Self, and Lisp. Had I worked in a Java environment I may not have had those insights until much later.
I'm sorry for coming across as a dick, but the idea that you "wasted" time learning a framework that became obsolete is silly to me, and it seems to be a common sentiment.
Ask yourself: at the time you used prototype.js, did it save time on the project?
If you answered Yes, then it was never a waste of time. Knowing prototype.js AND jQuery makes you a better developer: you learned the hard way that abusing prototypes can lead to hard-to-understand code. That can only be a good thing!
No, you're not being a dick. You're right — it definitely made me a better developer. To my memory I didn't switch because of a particular lack of a feature or features, but because jquery was being maintained more consistently.
Community support makes such a big difference, and now that I'm further down the line I'm averse to having to basically make a bet up front.
Those problems are best solved with Engineering best practices and culture, in my opinion. Each tough / innovative problem is probably somewhat unique for your startup, and picking a solution (a front-end framework) before you even know the problem limits your ability to solve it creativily.
Most programmers are good enough that with a good refactoring culture, they can evolve the equivalent of an in-house framework. Although, for some reason, I gather that programmers are scared of in-house "frameworks". I think that attitude is short-sighted since the app you build on top of the framework will end up being more complex than the framework itself.
It goes both ways. By rolling your own framework, you inevitably end up reinventing the wheel and solving problems that have already been solved. For each feature you need, you either have to create your own solution, or manually integrate a bunch of smaller libraries. On the other hand, committing to an established framework means you have to work around issues that the framework was not designed to solve.
I wouldn't dismiss using an established framework as "short-sighted". It's a tradeoff: the more complex and unique your problems are, the more it makes sense to roll your own.
I agree there. Deciding on tooling for a long term project is a very tough balancing act.
Although I am a bit afraid that people overestimate the costs of rolling your own code, or "re-inventing the wheel". In most cases you aren't reinventing the wheel, because there are well documented bodies of reference for the design of almost any wheel you could need. Building (writing) a wheel (code) from scratch against a spec is much, much less complicated than inventing it.
Likewise: assembling your own set of design patterns and writing code from scratch is not "re-inventing", and is a lot easier than we give it credit for.
Yeah, that's completely fair. I generally work on projects with constantly evolving requirements, so I tend to roll my own framework(s) by gluing together existing libraries that each solve a specific problem very well. That approach works well for me because most of the time I simply don't know the long-term implications of using an existing framework for any given project, so it's easier for me to evolve my own as I go. But I think there are a lot of projects out there that benefit greatly from the ecosystem behind certain frameworks (Rails comes to mind) and don't run into many bottlenecks due to said frameworks. For them, assembling a foundation is totally unnecessary because there's an open source framework that provides exactly what they need.
I don't have enough experience in different types of environments to say which approach is most suitable in most cases, but I'll definitely say that using an existing framework is the safer path (you have a community to lean back on), and is also advantageous for hiring. So I think you're correct when you say that many developers are afraid of rolling their own frameworks, but I think there are good reasons for that, especially for quickly-growing startups.
One hard lesson I learned is that you can't bet on a front end framework having the same mindshare for very long. The churn can get pretty crazy, and in my mind this nudges the needle a bit towards rolling your own for long term projects. Especially if you can offload the complex parts of the arch to the lower-churn backend world.
By rolling your own framework, you inevitably end up reinventing the wheel and solving problems that have already been solved.
You don't have to roll your own framework. You could always just use the micro-libraries that are ubiquitous in JS and pick an architecture that best fits your application. shrug to each their own. :)
Isn't that basically rolling your own framework? :) A "framework" doesn't have to be a huge 100k-LOC library--it can just be a set of conventions and design patterns with some code to enforce them--but you always need some kind of consistent structure in your application if you want it to be at all maintainable.
No, because a framework tells you where to put your code. It will say "put a handlebars file in application.hbs, this is the default, or you can override the default and load it manually" or something to this effect.
So a framework has that "convention over configuration" flavor, while libraries are explicit. You actually have to load the application.hbs file manually with a handlebars parser. Then you use another library for the router, etc.
Maybe we have different definitions for what a framework is, but I strongly disagree with the notion that frameworks have to be implicit and magical. Libraries solve specific problems; frameworks help you structure your code. That doesn't mean that your framework needs to automatically load files named a certain way, or magically call certain methods; it can just be a set of conventions that are optionally enforced by code.
I can't imagine the spaghetti that would result from not using any framework (even a tiny handmade one) and just throwing a bunch of libraries together.
What? By your definition object orientation is a "framework" because it "helps you structure code" and is "a set of conventions that are optionally enforced by code". That's not a framework, that's a paradigm!
If a framework doesn't do something implicitly it's just a large library. If it's a set of conventions not backed by baked-in logic, it's a style guide.
A framework must CALL YOU. It usually gives you a piece of code that loads itself and lets you customize what it does by passing your code/configs to it. Then you tell it to run with what you gave it. The parts of the framework that you call yourself are actually "plug-ins" or basically framework-specific libraries.
If the framework never calls your code and you only call into the framework, that's always just a library. I would argue that actually it's easier to conflate a very full-featured library with a microframework because both really kind of call your code (especially when it's in the form of closures or a DSL).
You would never accidentally call a framework a library, though, because it's obvious that it's handling things for you. It's running everything behind the scenes and you just kind of advise it to do the things you want.
A framework must CALL YOU. It usually gives you a piece of code that loads itself and lets you customize what it does by passing your code/configs to it. Then you tell it to run with what you gave it. The parts of the framework that you call yourself are actually "plug-ins" or basically framework-specific libraries.
I really like this description. I've been trying to come up with a better description of what a framework is and isn't and I kept falling short. This one works well. Thanks! :)
Isn't that basically rolling your own framework? :)
shrug Personally, I don't see it that way. Frameworks are more generalized and reusable. They tend to be so large because they have to take into account a wider degree of problems. Applications with custom architectures and some external libraries are very specific and not typically reusable. Maybe it's just a matter of degrees.
How many data points do you need to uniquely represent every person in earth? I bet its a smaller number then the number of constraints and requirements in your system.
(Not saying that this is bad -- just a random rant)