And I have to disagree with you. Doing UIs in native frameworks like JavaFX or even in a pure C++/WinAPI, is much more saner than doing any kind of UI in HTML/CSS. Ignoring flexbox for a second, which is kind of bleeding edge new thing, remind me - how exactly do you vertically center stuff with CSS? :P.
My two main issues with doing UIs on the web are:
- web stack is terribly unpredicatable; you're trying to force an inherently document-layout-oriented model into a free-form 2D canvas, which leads to layouts exploding whenever user switches browser/OS/device/timezone/whatever.
- the code makes no sense; no matter how crappy the Java APIs were (due to deficiencies of the language mostly), the code you wrote at least did what it said, because it expressed the UI concepts explicitly. HTML/CSS is a huge mess of insanity when it comes to doing UI work. I mean, in what reasonable world should the idea "center this" be expressed as "set the left and right margin to 'auto'"? CSS is full of stuff like that.
(And then there are some silly philosophies like "separation of form and content" which everyone touts, but rarely anyone actually follows; see e.g. grid layouts.)
Not ignoring Flexbox, this is the crux of my problem with web development. There are 8,476 different frameworks, transpilers, toolkits, and what have you that all kinda-sorta do the same things. When first approaching this world you get confronted with alphabet soups of packages all combined to "make front end development sane". Everybody seems to have their own soup, though, and many claim that theirs is the way to do development. The flexibility that so many Node-style devs love leads directly to this impenetrability and fragility.
> Not ignoring Flexbox, this is the crux of my problem with web development. There are 8,476 different frameworks, transpilers, toolkits, and what have you that all kinda-sorta do the same things
If they do the same thing, pick one and dig in. I really don't get this argument - walking down the cereal aisle will not generate this amount of antipathy despite the amount of choice available; why on earth should development different?
The optimal taste, texture and crunchiness is different for everyone, you can even default to the traditional oats or corn flakes if the newfangled cereals are too brightly-colored or too confusing for you[1].
I love the JS ecosystem and its Cambrian explosion - lots of ideas (good and bad) being tried out by other people[2] and the good ideas tend to be adopted by the more mainstream projects.
1. This is obviously a thinly veiled allusion
2. This is important - don't be the guinea pig and don't jump onto the latest and greatest.
> If they do the same thing, pick one and dig in. I really don't get this argument - walking down the cereal aisle will not generate this amount of antipathy despite the amount of choice available; why on earth should development different?
If I don't like the cereal I've wasted a couple of bucks. Picking the wrong framework can be much more costly in terms of time/money. And with the amount of framework churn you can't even make a good decision because in two years time everyone's moved on to the next big thing.
And as he said (and it bears repeating): "This is important - don't be the guinea pig and don't jump onto the latest and greatest."
How to pick the right one: age ("old" but not too old) x community x documentation
For the simplest developments I used jQuery (which is a thin layer over pure JS). If you need more complexity you could go for a higher level framework (but there were not so great things like JavascriptMVC)
PHP gets a lot of bad rap but Fb is built on it
There is no perfect solution. When I see people "praising" Win32 I can just laugh (no, really, anything is better than this: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb384843.aspx) but I think the advantage of that is that there was only few alternatives so once the learning curve was gone that was it)
I have returned back to native UIs development (WPF/Forms/XAML/Android), after 4 years of web development, couldn't be happier in what concerns my productivity.
My two main issues with doing UIs on the web are:
- web stack is terribly unpredicatable; you're trying to force an inherently document-layout-oriented model into a free-form 2D canvas, which leads to layouts exploding whenever user switches browser/OS/device/timezone/whatever.
- the code makes no sense; no matter how crappy the Java APIs were (due to deficiencies of the language mostly), the code you wrote at least did what it said, because it expressed the UI concepts explicitly. HTML/CSS is a huge mess of insanity when it comes to doing UI work. I mean, in what reasonable world should the idea "center this" be expressed as "set the left and right margin to 'auto'"? CSS is full of stuff like that.
(And then there are some silly philosophies like "separation of form and content" which everyone touts, but rarely anyone actually follows; see e.g. grid layouts.)