I’ve spent the last few days learning Ember, which is a software framework for making apps that run in your browser. It’s fun to learn new things, and it has been fun to learn Ember, which to me is a less-awful-than-most javascript framework.
(Things are going to be technical for a bit; please stand by for the rant that is the foundation of this episode — which is also technical.)
The good news: I have never taken a tutorial for any framework on any platform that put testing right up front the way Ember’s did. That is magnificent. The testing facilities are extensive, and to showcase them in the training can only help the new adopters understand their value. Put the robots to work finding bugs!
Also good news: Efficient route handling. Nested routes that efficiently know which parts of the page need to be redrawn, while providing bookmarkable URLs for any given state is pretty nice.
But… I’m still writing html and css shit. WTF?
Yeah, baby, it’s ranting time.
Let’s just start with this: HTML is awful. It is a collection of woefully-shortsighted and often random decisions that made developing useful Web applications problematic. But if your app is to work in a browser, it must generate HTML. Fine. But that shouldn’t be my problem anymore.
When I write an application that will run on your computer or your phone or whatever, I DON’T CARE how the application draws its stuff on the screen. It’s not important to me. I say, at a very high level, that I expect text in a particular location, it will have a certain appearance based on its role in my application, and that if something changes the text will update. That’s all.
I don’t want to hear about html tags. Tags are an implementation detail that the framework should take care of if my application is running in a browser. Tags are the HOW of my text appearing where I want it. I DON’T CARE HOW. Just do it!
When I came to work in my current organization, the Web clients of all our applications were built with a homegrown library called Maelstrom. It was flawed in many ways, being the product of two programmers who also had to get their projects done, and neither of whom were well-suited for the task of ground-up framework design (in their defense, the people who invented HTML were even less qualified). But Maelstom had that one thing. It had the “you don’t have to know how browsers work, just build your dang application” ethos.
There was work to be done. But with more love and a general overhaul of the interfaces of the components, it could have been pretty awesome.
Why don’t other javascript libraries adopt that approach? I think it’s because they are made by Web developers who, to get where they are, have learned all the HTML bullshit until it is second nature. The HOW has been part of their life since they were script-kiddies. It’s simply never occurred to them that the HOW should not be something the app developer has to think about.
There have been exceptions — SproutCore comes to mind — but I have to recognize that I am a minority voice. Dealing with presentation minutiae is Just Part of the Job for most Web client developers. They haven’t been spoiled by the frameworks available on every other platform that take care of that shit.
My merry little band of engineers has moved on from Maelstrom, mainly because something like that is a commitment, and we are few, and we wanted to be able to leverage the efforts of other people in the company. So our tiny group has embraced Ember, and on top of that a huge library of UI elements that fit the corporate standards.
It’s good mostly, and the testing facilities are great. Nothing like that in Maelstrom! But here I am, back to dealing with fucking HTML and CSS.
