The Cappuccino Blog - Latest Comments in On Leaky Abstractions and Objective-J

Re: On Leaky Abstractions and Objective-J

Harry Bosh — Tue, 02 Jul 2013 22:44:23 -0000

Spot on, glad to be apart of this thinking

Re: On Leaky Abstractions and Objective-J

San Francisco Music — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 05:10:37 -0000

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Re: On Leaky Abstractions and Objective-J

Michael A. Jackson — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 06:59:00 -0000

Don't let the trolls get you down, "A Foolish Consistency is the Hobgoblin of Little Minds".

I'm all in...ready and waiting for Atlas Beta for Windows!

Just for the sake of discussion, wouldn't the second diagram be SVG + Javascript?

Also, I'm thinking about the step to the third diagram with ???, where Javascript really is out of the picture. I was thinking GWT might bridge that gap better. After, more thought, that is so far down the road, I doubt GWT would be any more relevant. I also wouldn't want to discount the significance of being able to edit/refresh the browser as you say...ultimately developing right in the browser! Also, this is where your build tools might someday get their guts replaced to migrate to ???.

Re: On Leaky Abstractions and Objective-J

Johnlabarge — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 21:00:42 -0000

This article was absolutely fantastic.

Re: On Leaky Abstractions and Objective-J

Joel Norvell — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 18:39:33 -0000

I think this is a brilliant article. For me, Cappuccino and Objective-J are an incredible and unexpected boon -- providing a way out of the client-bound, and a way forward onto the web -- a real future, but one that doesn't require the sacrifice of my past!

Re: On Leaky Abstractions and Objective-J

penny — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 17:05:12 -0000

smalltalk like syntax is what won me in the first place....You have to program as you talk..this is what i call syntax...well, smalltalk.

Re: On Leaky Abstractions and Objective-J

Tim — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 16:33:31 -0000

P.S. I also felt the need to respond to John Resig with a post of my own
http://web.2point1.com/2009...

Re: On Leaky Abstractions and Objective-J

Tim — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 15:11:29 -0000

That's an extensive article, great work.
I totally agree that the likes of Prototype and jQuery are limited as they don't extend the syntax. Furthermore the sugared-syntax that with its clever use of whitespace is very unintuitive indeed, and stands in the way of developers new to JavaScript gaining any real understanding of it.

It is at this point that I must plug my own project which is an abstraction in ActionScript. You write AS3 and the JASPA compiler generates regular JavaScript from it. http://www.jaspa.org.uk/

Re: On Leaky Abstractions and Objective-J

tlrobinson — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 21:12:55 -0000

Thanks. Also fixed.

Re: On Leaky Abstractions and Objective-J

tlrobinson — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 21:12:29 -0000

Thanks. Fixed.

Re: On Leaky Abstractions and Objective-J

patrickdanger — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 15:42:44 -0000

Great post, very reasonable interpretation of Spoelsky's wide-net analysis.

I have read a lot of the reaction to Objective-J and Cappuccino with a critical eye, as I think what you've done is fantastic, and struck me as the next logical step following the glut of library development designed to abstract platform complexity.

This is, in my opinion, the third tier missing in your diagram above right below the various collections of technologies that make the web run, as many browsers have idiosyncratic implementations of standards.

Re: On Leaky Abstractions and Objective-J

Steve I — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 19:07:18 -0000

Great article , clears up alot!

As a researcher I welcome and embrace all new ideas, and I find it disturbing all the negative comments you guys receive about your technologies. Some people seem to be taking this as though you somehow claim your solutions as the ultimate truth and force them upon us so that we may never program the web in javascript again.

Anyway, I thank you for embracing openness and helping in your own way move the technological world forward, you have developed an interesting idea for your own purpose and been good enough to show it to the world... for the flamers out there, if you dont like it and have good reason, by all means say so, but then simply realise you dont have to use it and leave the poor guys in peace!

Re: On Leaky Abstractions and Objective-J

Robert — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 16:21:43 -0000

Great article. You have a small typo where you misspelled "design" :

"To better understand them, we have to take a look at what the principal desing goals of Objective-J actually were"

Re: On Leaky Abstractions and Objective-J

Dale — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 17:30:20 -0000

"outway"? - no way!

"outweigh" - yes way!

Re: On Leaky Abstractions and Objective-J

SubGenius — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 11:29:59 -0000

O.J.

Re: On Leaky Abstractions and Objective-J

Ben Darlow — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 10:58:02 -0000

It's not my intention to be rude, although I do think it's important that the things I've pointed out be said. For many years there was an active movement within the web development industry to embrace a standards-driven, accessible, best-practice approach; yet in recent years it seems that more and more of this mindset is being eroded by a desire to do ‘fancy’ things that ignore the basics.

My ideology is simple, really: if you want to make a desktop application, don't build it as a web application. And if you want to build a web application, embrace best practice.

As I said before, this isn't just about accessibility. Think about all the different types of device that might access your application in the future. I noticed that your framework implements its own scrollbars (lord knows why); this approach means that you can't scroll the view in MobileSafari (and slider controls don't work either). Could you have foreseen that? Perhaps. But then what? Build specific exceptions to make it work for MobileSafari? What about the next big mobile device that has a built-in browser? Just how well can you scale the practice of making exceptions?

I didn't realise Gmail wasn't written using GWT, but my points still hold (just inspect the DOM to find what the Compose Mail ‘link’ really is, to see what I mean).

Re: On Leaky Abstractions and Objective-J

tlrobinson — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 10:43:48 -0000

I certainly don't think it's black and white, but we try to emphasize that Cappuccino is a technology far on the "rich application" end of the spectrum.

Anyway, I'm not going to continue this discussion if you're going to be rude. It's clear I'm not going

By the way, Gmail is not built with GWT (almost none of their public apps are) but the point stands: all the major players writing complex client-side apps don't worry about whether or not the DOM structure has perfect semantic meaning.

Re: On Leaky Abstractions and Objective-J

MichaelStroeck — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 10:43:41 -0000

You know, LISP, Scheme, Smalltalk, etc. are not for everyone. I know really, really good and efficient software engineers who have tried repeatedly, but can't really wrap their heads around any of them.

A simple reason for that is that, with all the C/Java/C++/Perl/... code to maintain and extend, they simply don't have the time to spend a year learning the other languages from the ground up... That sucks, but for that reason there will always be a place for excellent software engineering projects like Objective-J.

Re: On Leaky Abstractions and Objective-J

Ben Darlow — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 10:09:23 -0000

What a messy, confused response.

You imply that there is some black and white distinction between web pages and web applications, as if accessibility and cross-device compatibility only matters for some and not for others. There isn't.

You say that because HTML is a document markup language (which it isn't, entirely; there's plenty within the HTML spec which has nothing to do with documents) that gives you carte blanche to ignore it and treat it as a ‘rendering layer’. This is wrong too.

Desktop applications don't have to provide semantically descriptive underpinnings because (when properly implemented) the operating system they run on will do that for them; that's one reason why software developers are recommended to use API methods and standardised interfaces — because the operating system can then provide all its standard accessibility mechanisms to these applications. It's a spurious comparison to make in any rate; this is the web, not a desktop application.

If you do not understand the benefits of having a structure to the underlying elements that your application is built from then I say again — go back and read and understand why these technologies exist. This is not simply about accessibility.

Oh, and as far as Gmail goes; that's about as bad an example to cite as is possible (as is true with all the apps Google have built using the GWT) as they fall foul of exactly the same ignorance of a layered approach.

Re: On Leaky Abstractions and Objective-J

tlrobinson — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 09:04:16 -0000

I'd just like to remind you that Cappuccino is not intended to be used for websites, but rather single "page" rich web applications. If that were not the case then I would agree with you.

I'd also like to point out that HTML is fundamentally a document markup language, not a rich application technology. Cappuccino accepts that fact, and rather than attempting to shoehorn an application into semantically meaningful HTML tags, it simply uses the DOM as a "rendering" layer. The DOM is a means to an end.

Are you also upset that the user interfaces of your desktop apps, like MS Word, or the web browser itself, aren't made with semantically descriptive HTML? No, of course not.

There is no advantage to having such a structure to the application itself since it is not content. If you're concerned about accessibility, that's exactly what WAI-ARIA is for (admittedly Cappuccino does not yet support it, but that's a separate issue)

Take a look at Gmail, Meebo, or any other complex web application. They all do similar things.

Re: On Leaky Abstractions and Objective-J

Ben Darlow — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 07:14:36 -0000

Just to clarify; I was referring to machine code rather than assembly as not being written for human beings, although I think that was probably what you were referring to as well.

Re: On Leaky Abstractions and Objective-J

Hunter Morris — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 07:11:12 -0000

Bret, I would say that's a slightly unfair comparison. C compilers tend to be far more mature than projects like Cappuccino. Also, web developers are faced with a largely different set of problems than C programmers. For example, knowing how to progressively enhance an interface is crucial to developing an accessible website. C programmers may worry about locality of reference where a web developer doesn't.

For what it's worth, I've encountered many cases where I have had to write inline assembly and/or read C compiler output.

Re: On Leaky Abstractions and Objective-J

Ben Darlow — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 06:56:33 -0000

This is a spurious analogy. The underlying assembly language is not written for a human being; it's written for a microprocessor and has an unambiguous interpretation. Markup is a semantic descriptor for information which isn't prescriptive about how it should be used, only what it means. The mistake being made by the authors of this framework is in assuming that the only meaning (and purpose) of markup is how it looks, which is just plain wrong.

Markup can be interpreted in many different ways, and each is valid provided that the underlying meaning is still the same. A very simple example would be the strong tag. This is commonly used to embolden text, but its true purpose is to imply strong emphasis on a word or sentence. The visual representation is entirely lost to somebody having the page read out to them, and so instead the voice reading the page would use emphasis to represent it instead.

These are fundamental concepts of web development.

Re: On Leaky Abstractions and Objective-J

Bret — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 05:56:37 -0000

Ben, do you look at your C compiler's output and complain about the label soup that it squirts out into the assembly source, or the awful, awful way in which registers are allocated?

Or are you just glad that you don't have to think about assembly code in the first place?

Re: On Leaky Abstractions and Objective-J

Ben Darlow — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 05:07:33 -0000

I'm not going to make any comments regarding the language abstraction issue, but one particular part of this article stood out for me:

“It’s never really clear whether you should create a button in HTML or in JavaScript code, and whether you should style it in a CSS files or apply styles manually in JavaScript, or whether you should just use Canvas to draw everything.”

If the reasons why you should create a button in HTML and not JavaScript are not obvious to you, then you should not be writing a web framework that deals with these things. If you cannot understand the benefits of defining your appearance through CSS rather than JavaScript, then you do not understand the reasons behind why these technologies exist. It's as simple as that, and it disturbs me that a framework could arise where the author doesn't understand the fundamental concept of separation of concerns in web technologies.

I'd say I'm surprised, but I'm not; I've already seen the tag soup that Cappucino squirts out into the DOM, and the awful, awful way in which appearance is defined. I'd strongly advise you to do some more reading about why these things came to be, and try learning about how to build web applications in an extensible and layered fashion. Until then, my view is that Cappucino is not something that should be seriously considered for building web applications.