💾 Archived View for zaibatsu.circumlunar.space › ~visiblink › phlog › 20191115 captured on 2022-04-29 at 11:45:04.
⬅️ Previous capture (2021-12-03)
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I like javascript. There. That's out of the way. dbucklin wrote a great post about coding as craft. I am not a craftsman. I hack things together. I don't even know enough to know whether my coding is ugly or full of security holes. I try to be as concise as possible and to keep it tidy, logical, and commented. That's about it. What I really liked about dbucklin's post were the use-what-you-want-to-use comments. There's a general animosity toward javascript in gopherspace (and elsewhere), but I think it's misplaced. There's no reason to blame a tool for what people do with it. Javascript is not particularly 'heavy' or 'bloated.' You can definitely overload a site with it and it plays a significant role in tracking and advertising. But those results are the products of decision-making. They're not problems with the language itself.[1] In any case, a couple of years ago, the unofficial Google News app (NewsG) for webOS died and I decided that I wanted to create a replacement for it. Yeah, I know. I'm on the wrong side of that one too! ;) I hadn't programmed since the days of BASIC and Turbo Pascal, so the whole project was exploratory for me. It was a lot of fun and I derived a great sense of accomplishment from it. webOS apps rely on proprietary javascript frameworks called Mojo and Enyo, and neither is particularly well documented. It quickly became apparent that using those frameworks was going to be difficult for me -- and that learning them was going to take me into a dead end. I hoped to learn skills that would be transferrable to other settings in the future. Outdated mobile frameworks didn't really help in that respect. In addition, I didn't have my own VPS at the time, so my solution had to either run on the device or be hosted on my webhosting account. As a final consideration, I wanted the app to be easily portable to other platforms. The solution to all of these problems was javascript. I worked through a great book called Eloquent Javascript and -- with the help of w3schools and a whole bunch of helpful people on sites like Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange (not to mention an RSS feed renderer called feed2js) -- I managed to cobble together a web app that displays Google News RSS feeds with the option to open the links through Google's mobilizer to speed up rendering on very old devices. The entire site is written in html, css, and javascript. It's neither heavy nor bloated. The proof is that it works quickly on my old HP Pre3, which has one of the worst browsers ever made. As a result, I have to conclude that it takes a LOT of javascript (gargantuan amounts!) to weigh down a modern browser. There were real benefits to creating a javascript-based web app in this manner. The first was that it was relatively easy to create webview apps to install on different devices and then format the site differently on each device via browser detection and css. The second is that I never have to update the mobile apps. When something breaks, I just update the website code, and the users (there are at least two of us!) don't have to download app updates. You can try out the site here: http://darkstar.x10host.com/news_beta It will work best in your desktop browser or on webOS or BlackBerry OS7. There are no stylesheets targeting Android or iOS devices so it will probably look terrible on them. The mobile apps are here: webOS: https://github.com/Shuswap/NewsZ-Build BlackBerry OS 7: http://darkstar.x10host.com/Launchers/NewsZ/NewsZ.jad And I shared the webOS web app template I created here: https://github.com/Shuswap/template_webview_app [1] I am painfully aware that I just made the standard anti-gun-control argument about javascript. But you know it's true. Javascript doesn't kill browsing. People kill browsing.