Comment by atomicnumber3

3 months ago

I wish js (and, really, "html/css/js/browser as a desktop application engine) wasn't so bad. I was born into a clan writing desktop apps in Swing, and while I know why the browser won, Swing (and all the other non-browser desktop app frameworks/toolkits) are just such a fundamentally better paradigm for handling data. It lets you pick what happens client-side and server-side based more on what intrinsically makes sense (let clients handle "view"-layer processing, let servers own distributed application state coordination).

In JS-land, you're right. You should basically do as little as is humanly possible in the view layer, which imo leads to a proliferation of extra network calls and weirdly-shaped backend responses.

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atomicnumber3

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teeth-gnasher  3 months ago

The need to manage data access on the server does not go away when you stop using javascript. Is there something specifically about Swing that somehow provides proper access control, or is it simply the case that it is slightly more work to circumvent the front end when it doesn’t ship with built in dev tools?

  • atomicnumber3  3 months ago

    Did I say anything about access control? There's a big difference between "this has to happen server side for security reasons" and "this has to happen server side because our UI/client language is so hapless that it can't handle any amount of additional processing".

    • teeth-gnasher  3 months ago

      The entire thread is about access control…

      JS is perfectly powerful, if you don’t know how to use it that’s a good learning opportunity.

  • dylan604  3 months ago

    The built-in dev tools is the key thing. If there was no way for the client to manipulate things, it wouldn't be too far off from other local apps. Reversing is always going to be a threat vector, but the low bar to entry of using the dev tools makes it a non-starter for me.

    If using Ghirdra was as simple as using the dev tools, the software industry would collapse.

    • noman-land  3 months ago

      The built in dev tools are fundamental to an open web. If you don't want someone to look at something in their own possession then don't send it to them in the first place. Obfuscating it is rude and is false security anyway.

      The grand rule is don't trust the client. People break this rule and then try to paper over it with obfuscation, blame, and tightening their control.

      8 replies →

wiseowise  3 months ago

> I was born into a clan writing desktop apps in Swing, and while I know why the browser won, Swing (and all the other non-browser desktop app frameworks/toolkits) are just such a fundamentally better paradigm for handling data.

No, by a large margin no. Java is a hostile language to prototype programs at which JS excels. Awful styling, walls of code just to get sane defaults (https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/uiswing/dnd/together..., seriously?).