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Nicolas de Mauroy
Nicolas de Mauroy

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My late and enthusiastic discovery of HTML5

I was 23 years old in 2000, and I missed the web revolution. Back then, I loved to write performant C code, nurturing my pointers with love. So I could only be dismissive the poor performance and inelegant design of Internet technologies, most of all Javascript (come on, can a serious language not be compiled ?). I do not like to think about opportunities I missed because of this.

So in 2010, when I started thinking about designing software on my own, which later turned in the Open Lowcode project, I naturally went for a native client, using java JavaFX technology. I could actually develop what I wanted, but I had two problems.

First, when I tried to promote my software, nobody was interested by a design using untrendy technology, even if it had some advantages, like stability and performance.

Also, developing the interface I wanted in JavaFX turned out to be more complex than I thought. I think you can spend a lifetime in the Table widget not getting exactly the result you expect. With the technology now in maintenance mode, there are limited hopes it will get improved.

So we are now in 2022, and I would like to have a go at developing another 'serious' software in parallel to my video game project. I have decided to use the most widespread trending technology this time.

So I humbly went to W3C Schools, and started to learn HTML5 last week-end. I am a few days into it, and long-story short, I completely love it. I can build good looking feature rich screens really easily. Modern browsers have super powerful debugging features. The DOM API in javascript allows to define really rich interactions. I think I can easily build spreadsheet-like features , the holy grail of any enterprise software, from mostly native HTML5 with a few snippets of javascripts here and there.

Now, I need to figure out the server technology, both for the web server and the storage. I need something easily deployable on big cloud providers, trendy, and having good performance. Any recommendation ?

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