back

by toddmorey·8y ago·view on hn ↗
I think we are seeing big changes in the platform that actually make it a very exciting time to be a web developer.

- Much better tooling & testing

- Excellent editors like VSCode

- Javascript ES6-7 (and the renewed energy of the language)

- GPU accelerated CSS transitions and effects

- Web assembly

- Modern component frameworks & state management

- So many APIs to cover things you used to have to do yourself: payment, transactional email, authentication

- More expressive APIs like GraphQL

- No real need to maintain infrastructure: publish to CDN services; consume APIs.

Compared to development on [favorite-platform-here] it may not be as seamless, but that's an unfair comparison. You have to compare it other forms of cross-platform development, and there the web really shines. It certainly has its flaws and gaps, but I love what's currently happening in the space.

1 comments
Websites are at least supposedly are sandboxed so they are not as much of a risk as running native binaries. But this is getting worse and worse though as browsers expose more and more of their host operating system's functionality. The benefits of using a website instead of a native app are quickly disappearing, while the drawbacks have only been somewhat mitigated. We're getting to the point where browsers are worthy of the decades old criticism Emacs has received. They have eventually become an OS with many fine features - simply lacking a good web browser.
The main advantage to a browser is auto updates. It enabled a number of saas apps that would otherwise be very costly to replicate and maintain.
The main benefit is not only sandbox. It's openness (intend to be), linking to resources world wide, cross-platform, auto update. Native app is great but also costly to SME.