The next level future of UI would be something as developer-productive as Visual Basic .NET from 2007: lay out my app visually in minutes, double click to add code, build, run, ship.
It's 2016 and I'm still using a soup of hacks to build web UIs. GWT was promising but far too clunky. React+Bootstrap is almost there but I still have to write code to make wheels roll (in a parser hack called JSX!) and I still have to think about the web layer instead of having it abstracted away. As soon as I start using anything else I have to drag in a soup of hacks, so in the end I always end up with a web app with a hundred dependencies. Sorry, must have (insert hipster framework here) installed too if I want to embed BeanieCap.JS.
I would pay thousands of dollars for something as productive as VS.NET from 2007 but for generating modern responsive UIs for the web. It's okay to simplify the problem by being opinionated, but only if your opinions don't suck and only if whatever abstractions you create are elegant and degrade gracefully when they (inevitably) leak a little. Now that MS is open sourcing .NET, adding web UIs to Xamarin and making them work like mobile and desktop would be one route to this. Another would be to reboot GWT using Go->ASM.JS as the code path and do the UI in Go, then build a visual UI designer for it. Use the dom as a renderer and shit-can CSS and all the rest of that stuff in favor of an opinionated uniform minimally-themable design (as long as it doesn't look like crap).
Every now and then I go searching for this. Nope, still doesn't exist. I have a wad of cash in hand but nobody will take it so back to hacking web UIs in a text editor manually. Sigh.
The problem is that we're trying to think in terms of "apps" on a platform that was invented and built in terms of "documents." The web wasn't designed to be an "interface", the browser was, and it's purpose was to display interlinked documents.
On top of this, the pace of the web's development has outstripped the capability of anyone to actually plan the extensions to this base model, so everything since is just hacks on top of hacks. But it works enough for people to keep going through investor storytime year on year, so ... we continue to move fast, and break everything.
I would argue that .NET did allow for developers to be very productive at shipping the worst UI code I have ever seen. Productivity != shipping horrible code faster than ever. In my opinion.
It's 2016 and I'm still using a soup of hacks to build web UIs. GWT was promising but far too clunky. React+Bootstrap is almost there but I still have to write code to make wheels roll (in a parser hack called JSX!) and I still have to think about the web layer instead of having it abstracted away. As soon as I start using anything else I have to drag in a soup of hacks, so in the end I always end up with a web app with a hundred dependencies. Sorry, must have (insert hipster framework here) installed too if I want to embed BeanieCap.JS.
I would pay thousands of dollars for something as productive as VS.NET from 2007 but for generating modern responsive UIs for the web. It's okay to simplify the problem by being opinionated, but only if your opinions don't suck and only if whatever abstractions you create are elegant and degrade gracefully when they (inevitably) leak a little. Now that MS is open sourcing .NET, adding web UIs to Xamarin and making them work like mobile and desktop would be one route to this. Another would be to reboot GWT using Go->ASM.JS as the code path and do the UI in Go, then build a visual UI designer for it. Use the dom as a renderer and shit-can CSS and all the rest of that stuff in favor of an opinionated uniform minimally-themable design (as long as it doesn't look like crap).
Every now and then I go searching for this. Nope, still doesn't exist. I have a wad of cash in hand but nobody will take it so back to hacking web UIs in a text editor manually. Sigh.