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HTML5 App For Panasonic TVs Rejected - JQuery Is a "Hack"
An anonymous reader writes "I have been working on an HTML5 app for Panasonic VIERA TVs, specifically a client for the Plex Media Server. After paying $129 for the developer program, version 1.0 was submitted for inclusion in their VIERA Connect marketplace several weeks ago. After a few requested tweaks, they inquired about how the client communicated with the Plex Server. As many/most web developers do, I used jQuery and its $.ajax call (which is just a wrapper for XMLHttpRequest()). They insisted this was not standard Javascript, and after several communications with them, they replied back with "A workaround like this is considered a hack.". I'm stunned that anyone familiar with HTML would consider jQuery a hack. I've been patient in attempting to explain how jQuery works, but I am getting nowhere. Any thoughts on how I can better explain jQuery to an app reviewer? Yes, I know I can write my app without any Javascript library, but I am really hoping avoid that."
My Eyeses Precious!! they burnses!!
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Most tech out there is a hack on top of a hack, that's what people do, they hack shit together.
You can't handle the truth.
Reddit isn't going to work. I like Hackaday.. But really, where is the best alternative? Can't use Slashdot much longer with this Beta.
Panasonic has no clue about technology? Hahahahahahahahaha. That's a good one. No they simply don't want retarded web monkeys writing bloated apps for their TVs.
Oh man so many of those examples are ridiculous.
Look you don't need jQuery! You just type 20 lines of code and it does the same thing as jQuery's 1 line of code.
See? jQuery isn't needed at all.
Hell no, we knew that for several months. What we learned today is that they're planning to promote the beta despite several months of people telling them it sucks. This is what annoys me even more than the bad design - they actually solicited our feedback, and we took the time to give it, then they completely ignored it.
Also, anybody whose development environment his HTML5/Javascript is...shall we say... poorly positioned to complain about people using giant stacks of abstraction layers.
We didn't learn that today. We've known that since October 1, 2013.
1191 posts, (no, Beta, I won't click "more posts" a million times to read the entire thread, I'll just leave), nearly universal negative feedback, a bounce rate that must be in the 90%+ range (the other 10% being people who don't know how to turn it off), and despite having helped document the UX failures of Unity and Windows 8, Dice continues to double down on its own UX fail.
That's what Slashdot is for now.
Comments about how beta sucks, repeating "FUCK BETA" and... Fuck Beta.
I see no point discussing about anything else until they kill that abomination or just let us to continue using the classic interface.
Also, fuck beta.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Not that this makes either Panasonic or Apple 'better' in any way; but what strikes me as insane is that Panasonic would feel that they are in the position to be all fiddly and demanding about 'apps' submitted for their 'smart TV' platform.
Apple, as obnoxious as their control freakery has always been, undeniably have a walled garden that people would fight like dogs to get their applications into. Their position, in terms of platform ownership, is unbelievably enviable. They can be dicks all they like; because what are you going to do about it?
Panasonic? One of the largely-interchangeable makers of perfectly adequate but not thrilling TVs, pretty much every last one of which has a shitty 'smart TV' platform, all braindead in somewhat different and incompatible ways? What kind of leverage do they think they have?
And the suckage got much louder today.
I agree 100% The new design offers NOTHING. It is utterly soulless and spaces everything out requiring more and more fucking scrolling. Which is what seems to be the damn trend.
FUCK BETA
Reading the actual email they sent, it sounds to me like they provide a (javascript) API for doing what "VieraApp" is instead doing with a direct ajax call (and jQuery vs XMLHttpRequest is not the issue; it's not using their wrapper that is the issue).
Implying the APP STORE on the TELEVISION....PLATFORM! isn't bloat enough?
Sod that. Just point them at their own web site, where jQuery is included in every page, and tell them they've been hacked.
Patent litigation: A doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction... in which everyone seems willing to push the button
I believe he cited a number of points including the reduction in data density and the disregard for tradition in both form and function. Both points I also agree with. The beta version disregards the historical user base and its preferences in an attempt to attract non-Slashdot types.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
Inline it (jQuery).
When they ask how it communicates, tell them how, not what functions/callbacks you use in your code.
Ex. The server communicates using the standard Plex web API (or whatever it's called), documented _here_. The RCP calls are made using the standard XMLHttpRequest, with wrappers to ensure compatibility with the evolving web browser landscape. yada yada yada.
I'm sure it's a PITA, but I get the feeling the submitter said too much - explaining how jQuery internals work is going to seem like an over complicated nightmare. If they specifically ask about that weird looking "$.ajax" stuff, just tell them it is a simple wrapper that compensates for the subtle differences in XMLHttpRequest implementations. If the code finally gets to someone that can read it, they'll probably be quite familiar with jQuery and quite happy you are using it than some custom cobbled together hack :-)
Back then we THOUGHT we knew.
Now we KNOW we know.
It's a Zen thing. Like FUCK BETA.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
That hasn't been true for over 15 years. Also we are talking about a TV running applications, a device that's "for watching video, not a platform for running applications!", so your presumptions are simply wrong
The beta doesn't add any useful new features. All it does is remove them and severely fucks up the best part of this site: the commenting and moderation system. If the commenting system goes out the window, why would I come here? The stories are always several days or a week old, the editors are terrible at their job, and all of the actual articles are on other sites I could browse instead.
What the hell, Dice?
The best thing about UDP jokes is I don't care if you get them or not
Like a lot of the new UI changes lately, (First rev of KDE4, Win8, Gnome3, Unity) it makes the things I do often more difficult or imposable, and makes nothing I do often easier. "It is a beautiful new hammer, and we removed the head to streamline it."
This is what annoys me even more than the bad design - they actually solicited our feedback, and we took the time to give it, then they completely ignored it.
Hopefully they will listen to the crickets after classic is no longer an option...
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
I get the joke.
But seriously: they actually prove the point why things like jQuery exists in the first place; the JS examples are obfuscated and incompatible.
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Lolwut? You do understand that jquery is just a set of helper libraries written in...Javascript...right? It's not a 'core' language because it's not a language _or_ an 'extension' - it's a library of code.
There's no issue of browsers 'supporting' it, it's more an issue of it supporting any given browser and its eccentricities, which _you_ as a Javascript developer would need to do anyway.
Would you be happier if these non-"script kiddie" (lol) developers just pasted the jQuery code in their own files, does that make it better?
I think we're about on the same page. I use libraries as needed. If I can use one library to do 4 functions well, I won't use 4 different libraries to half-ass it because I found code in a forum post somewhere, and didn't want to think beyond "hey, lets copy & paste this in!" I won't include a library to save myself 3 (or 10) lines of code that I could put into my own function. On occasion, where I only needed a few lines of a huge library, I copy it (license permitting, of course), and note where and why I got it.
He didn't give us a lot to go on for this argument. He was doing something. He wanted to use jQuery. Panasonic said "no". He's complaining that they refused it. It wasn't even clear if he included jQuery with his code, or if he was calling it from Google or elsewhere. (i.e., <script src="//ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.10.2/jquery.min.js">) Including it with the code guarantees it won't get updated, ever. Calling it from elsewhere means that the TV must have Internet access to operate that function, which can't be guaranteed. You could quite literally have a bunch of apps, all using different versions of jQuery, wasting memory or storage space, when the functions could have been done in a few lines each, or it may have been unnecessary and leftover from during the dev cycle and never cleaned up.
From here: https://developers.google.com/...
They provide ajax.googleapis.com access to versions: 2.0.3, 2.0.2, 2.0.1, 2.0.0, 1.10.2, 1.10.1, 1.10.0, 1.9.1, 1.9.0, 1.8.3, 1.8.2, 1.8.1, 1.8.0, 1.7.2, 1.7.1, 1.7.0, 1.6.4, 1.6.3, 1.6.2, 1.6.1, 1.6.0, 1.5.2, 1.5.1, 1.5.0, 1.4.4, 1.4.3, 1.4.2, 1.4.1, 1.4.0, 1.3.2, 1.3.1, 1.3.0, 1.2.6, 1.2.3
What happens if next year Google decides not to host jQuery, or say all the pre 2.x versions. It could go the way of all those lovely Google Maps API sites that were v1 and many v2 sites. It's less than idea to force users to update. Users are dumb. That makes a support nightmare for them, for reasons the users simply won't understand.
If his code was very needy of the jQuery library, I could see it as being reasonable, but we can only guess. I know there's lots of cool stuff that can be done with it. I've only done some. :)
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.