I like the fact minimalist approaches, like svelte, htmx and alpine.js are getting more and more traction.
I felt like fighting this fight alone for years in the golden years of node, webpack and react where everybody was creating crazy stacks and adding GraphQL and so on, to basically get what Django + jquery did 10 years ago in a tenth of the time and code.
So far I also survived:
- xml is the future
- let's use nosql for all the things
- you must use the same language at the back and front
- yes, you site must have an AMP version (ah, you forgot this one, didn't you? It was sooo imporant, and then pouf, it was gone like tear in the rain)
- yes, your home page must be an SPA
- you can't code anything without async
- you can't live without a message queue
- everything must become a micro service
- of course you need a container for that
- of course you need a orchestrator to organize those containers
- of course you need the cloud, it would be crazy to deal with those containers and orchestrators yourself
- dude, why do you have a server? Use a serveless backend!
- dude, why do you have a backend? Just call saas from the edge!
Every year, some generation of engineers have to learn the concepts of "there is no silver bullet", "use the right tech for the right problem", "your are not google", "rewriting a codebase every 2 years is not a good business decision", "things cost money".
It's a bit more performant than MQTT, but it eats more ressources (bandwidth and cpu). It's still practical for IoT (although I use it for the Web), as the C++ implementation (https://github.com/crossbario/autobahn-cpp) targets embeded systems. However, it uses boost, so it won't fit in extrems memory requirements.
All it all, if your configuration allows it, it's way, way easier and more flexible than MQTT to use.
Combared to RabbitMQ, it's not as fast. You can't beat years of optimized Erlang and field testing by fortune 500. Yet, Rabbit MQ is very low level: you need to setup queues, and consumers, and if you need RPC with returned value you will add manual logic on top of it. Don't get me started if you want to load balance consummers. Real life AMQP is hard.
Comparatively crossbar offers a great out of the box experience.
All in all, I'd say the sweet spot for the tech is between the arduino/raspi and an average website/company micro service archi. If you have very small hardware, MQTT could fit in the tiny space, and if you have a 100 message highways interconnecting your data centers around the world, you may want AMQP. Between those, crossbar.io is great.
The general rule of thumbs is that Websocket are cheaper if you want long connection with states to maintain (you only need to identify once) or have a lot of small messages.
However, you have a low number of requests, or big requests, REST is going to be faster.
But as usual, it depends of your implementation and your constraint. After all, facebook is using polling if I recall.
If you want RPC and PUB/SUB over Websocket, you have the "Web Application Messaging Protocol" standard, which has implementations for Python, JS (node and in browser), PHP, C# and Java.
Checkout the main router, it's open source and handles a decent 6k msg/sec on a raspi: https://crossbar.io/
The best things about it is that you don't have to write the message schemas in advance, only the function signatures.
Yes, but you are part of the tech saavy bubble. That's not a solution for most users who don't want a downgraded version of their facebook/instagram/gmail/etc experience.
The line is not clear though. Some people present a new services with show HN and are acclaimed, others are rejected as advertisers. HN like underdogs, innovators and good-doers, but is less laxed with big companies, status quo and money lovers. So if the later can disguise as the formers, they can game the system.
Still, he was a hated personality nobody in the IT community would come close to and then suddenly everybody is loving the guy.
Some stuff really don't feel right. My first "oh-oh" moment was when this arrived on the imgur front page (apparently 2015, not 2016 so my timing is off):
Everything, form the title to the content and the firsts comment is really weird. After this, I started seeing the Gate foundation work popping everywhere, and supports in comments of major social medias where only suspicion was before.
I did a mission for the Gate foundation 8 years ago in Africa, and at that time nobody speaker about this entity. I had to explain it every time I talked to someone new.
I have a hard time to believe the medias suddenly took a (very one-sided) interest for something that have been here for such a long time for no reason.
Yes, yes, I can be totally wrong. Still I can't help but wonder.
Well, sometime you see a personality or a topic getting traction out of the blue. Any critic get quickly downvoted. No debate seems to take place.
I noticed that with Bill Gates. Before 2015, nothing different. In 2017, business as usual. But in 2016, Reddit, HN, Imgur suddenly had a surge of Gate support : success stories, interviews, praising using comments...
It's just a supposition of course, I have nothing to back it up.
But it makes sense to me that the PR experts have learned now that it can be very efficient to target online communities instead of spamming mass media. If they can influence them, then the PR will develop itself in an organic way, feel more honest and natural, and the community will spread the message outside of itself, giving the impression it's genuine.
The best communication is the one that doesn't look like it.
Controlling the big medias has been the challenge of the last century, but the intellectuals grew defiant of them. They rely more and more on cross referencing various sources and debating with communities made of their peers or people experts in one niche.
This is the logical next move. Although it seems harder to pull out, in the long run the cost/benefit ration seems better because it relies on a intimate feeling of trust we develop with the communities.
I know I do: I always read the comments before the articles on HN, because I trust the community to give me a better insight on the matter than the article itself. It's often the case. People are brilliant here, having a lot of accumulated knowledge, offering pieces of analysis, missing information, stories and counter points or even just summary that are the real added value of the site.
So if the community now hosts subtle communication experts, they will (and probably already have) influence my point of view.
Or that racism is an absolute. It's not. People can reject some other people in any direction, change course for good or bad at any point in life because of experiences or media, and this has usually nothing to do with personnal conviction. Just fear.
Usually it's more about a form of unstable and contextual xenophobia.
But it's not just against people. Also about all living things, object, behavior, events...
People are label racists like it's a deep nature, while it's most likely a small symptom of poor education + a twisted defensive reaction that is bigger than that, and is not particularly linked to race.