wisdom VS webtransport

If you want to output to a browser here is the guide to achieve the best possible performance according to the numbers:

https://github.com/prettydiff/wisdom/blob/master/performance...

Warning: every time I post this people claim to want superior performance but then whine when they realize they have to actually write code (as opposed to letting NPM or React or jQuery do 99% of everything).

This was attempt to research the fastest possible approach to a JavaScript GUI in the browser.

https://github.com/prettydiff/wisdom/blob/master/performance...

The techniques mentioned are stupid fast to the fewest milliseconds, but most JavaScript developers find this incredibly unpopular.

Measure everything and be extremely critical. Be ready to challenge common and popular held assumptions.

Here is something I wrote about extreme performance in JavaScript that is discarded by most programmers because most people that program JavaScript professionally cannot really program.

https://github.com/prettydiff/wisdom/blob/master/performance...

For simple state management here is what I do: https://github.com/prettydiff/wisdom/blob/master/state_manag...

Here is an application with an OS-like GUI making use of that concept: https://github.com/prettydiff/share-file-systems

The challenge is in determining who is about to become obsolete and that is not clear. For example OOP remains the most popular and requested programming paradigm even though it has gradually slid into functional obsolescence more than a decade ago[1].

Even still legacy code will remain in use and talent to maintain legacy systems will remain in demand. My university still teaches COBOL because there still exists demand for people to maintain these legacy applications even if new applications are no longer written in that language.

[1] https://github.com/prettydiff/wisdom/blob/master/Object_Orie...

That depends on how many changes it requires. If its just a matter of don't do these 3 things and your code suddenly becomes more predictable its like being slapped with a magic wand. Everybody wins. All you have to do to ensure 100% of your code compiles in a JIT is be predictable. Predictable code is, on its face, always less confusing.

> The performance benefits are likely to be minimal

This makes me cry, but not a cry of joy or ecstasy. People guessing about performance is perhaps the most frequent anti-pattern in all programming. Please read this document, you can skip to the end but it may not make much sense if you do. https://github.com/prettydiff/wisdom/blob/master/JavaScript_...

After talking about the biggest failures I have seen through my career in learning JavaScript I watched a YouTube video about an interview with a divorce attorney. It was interesting because the behaviors I heard expressed in that video exactly aligned with behaviors I see expressed in failures to learn after large commitments of time investment in programming. It inspired me to write this: https://github.com/prettydiff/wisdom/blob/master/JavaScript_...

The most important learning for me out of this is that people are predictable and how we commit is modeled by how perceptions of rewards are attained. It also inspired me to dive deeper into self learning about behavior and economics, because people do exceptionally irrational things to avoid perceived discomfort.

> just want to know what makes a good web framework.

Personal opinion. A framework is an architecture in a box so that you, the developer, do not have to make as many decisions. Normally when developers are asking such questions they are seeking easiness: https://github.com/prettydiff/wisdom/blob/master/Easiness.md

Software developers, especially DOM fearing front developers love using the word easy. It isn’t so much an infatuation but more like a fatal attraction obsession where obstruction means war on a very emotional level. Ironically, people are loathe to confront these feelings openly and thus cannot define the word easy with any kind of clear practical application.

So, I did the world a favor and wrote just such a definition: https://github.com/prettydiff/wisdom/blob/master/Easiness.md...

Depends on the definition of simplicity. People say they want simple, but then really want easy. The most easy is always somebody doing the work for you. I got tired of hearing people mention easy when really they probably mean some combination of fearful and/or lazy, so I chose to define easiness:

https://github.com/prettydiff/wisdom/blob/master/Easiness.md

If developers really wanted simplicity or to be done with work faster they would just learn the primitives of their environment: DOM, functions, and events. Most of the frameworks have APIs that are huge, so clearly simplicity isn't what's wanted.

WebTransport is now enabled by default and will be going to release with 114. As the original Explainer notes, it enables multiple use-cases that are hard or impossible to handle without it, especially for Gaming and live streaming. It covers cases that are problematic for alternative mechanisms, such as WebSockets. Built on top of HTTP3 (HTTP2 support will be coming later). The current implementation in Firefox is passing 505 out of 565 Web-Platform Tests.

WebTransport is still an emerging technology. As of November 2022, WebTransport is a draft specification with W3C, and there’s always a chance that aspects related to how it works may change.

Sort of. The browser will re-use the connection if you have a bunch of resources in the HTML. When rendering it sees that it needs 2 images and 3 javascript files from the same server, so it pipelines all of those. But for requests initiated from javascript, you're going to get a new connection for each one unless you're using a library that implements the long-polling hack. SocketIO can use the long-polling hack as a fallback if websockets is not supported. HTTP/2 (formerly SPDY) gets part of the way to replacing websockets, but it's not a synchronous link. Only the client can send messages to the server and the server can only respond to those message (with websockets, either side can send messages once the connection is open). FWIW, less than 50% of websites use HTTP/2. HTTP/3's webtransport looks like it could replace websockets, but it also looks like it'll live along side websockets.

If it's streaming data like dashboard statistics the new WebTransport API might be a much better base: https://github.com/w3c/webtransport/blob/main/explainer.md

Are you guys looking into the Web Transport protocol for the future? Right now you have to tunnel the websocket connections over http2 and it will probably be the same for http3 afaik.

I know there is this work in progress (https://w3c.github.io/webtransport/) and websockets are probably fine for a long time but sooner or later (unless there is an update to websockets) it will probably be faster to just do normal http requests and listen on server sent events.

What are your thoughts for Liveview for the future? Will it forever stay on websockets or would you be open to change the underlying technology if / when new stuff becomes available?

The W3C draft is here: https://github.com/w3c/webtransport

It's taken nearly 10 years for QUIC to be refined and adopted in the wild and we're basically there. There's even a new browser API in the works called WebTransport.

tl;dr using WebRTC just for realtime client<->server data sucks, but WebTransport[1] is coming soon to serve that exact usecase with an easy API

WebRTC has data channels, which are currently the only way to achieve unreliable and unordered real-time communication (UDP-style) between the browser and other browsers or a server. This is pretty essential for any networked application where latency is critical, like voice and video and fast-paced multiplayer games.

As other commenters have noted, it's a royal pain in the ass to set up WebRTC if all you want is UDP-style communication between a server and browser, since you need to wrangle half a dozen other protocols in the process.

However! A new API, WebTransport[1], is actively being developed that will offer a WebSockets-like (read: super simple to set up) API for UDP-style communication. I am extremely excited about it and its potential for real-time browser-based multiplayer games (which I'm working on).

https://github.com/w3c/webtransport