Building and debugging and testing a service worker is still so hard. Working out why this page is cached, or why it isn’t cached, or why it isn’t loading, is incredibly baffling and infuriating
I just spent the last two days at work updating an internal chrome extension that uses a service worker. I spent at least 3 hours one day repeatedly refreshing the page and updating the worker, only to realize there was a syntax error that was reported with a less than helpful message. It took a lot of fiddling to get it right. Service workers are cool, but very frustrating to debug!
Desktop app development gets a lot of flak but at least the tools are much nicer to work with. In comparison, browser development is still the wild wild west
Desktop app development gets a lot of flak but at least the tools are much nicer to work with.
And there’s a hierarchy of nice there too. I’ve had a few “oh wow” moments from experienced Java engineers watching SLIME-based Lisp development where you jump from macros down into disassembled functions and back up again, all over an SSH tunnel into a running test server.
It’s extremely infuriating, especially because it’s hard to tell whether one is doing something actually wrong, or if one’s doing exactly the right thing and the problem is that Cloudflare is caching the page or the web server is or… something. Somewhere in my head there is a conversation I want to have with someone who knows exactly what they’re doing on this front where I can say “look, here is the situation, I keep hitting refresh and I never get the new version, please tell me why” and then when they investigate and find out why, I can say “cool, how can we make the devtools be clearer in this situation so I won’t have to ask you next time”…
I just spent the last two days at work updating an internal chrome extension that uses a service worker. I spent at least 3 hours one day repeatedly refreshing the page and updating the worker, only to realize there was a syntax error that was reported with a less than helpful message. It took a lot of fiddling to get it right. Service workers are cool, but very frustrating to debug!
Desktop app development gets a lot of flak but at least the tools are much nicer to work with. In comparison, browser development is still the wild wild west
And there’s a hierarchy of nice there too. I’ve had a few “oh wow” moments from experienced Java engineers watching SLIME-based Lisp development where you jump from macros down into disassembled functions and back up again, all over an SSH tunnel into a running test server.
Agreed. On one hand it’s cool to see the constant innovation and creation in the web/browser space, but on the other it’s just so hard to keep up!
It’s extremely infuriating, especially because it’s hard to tell whether one is doing something actually wrong, or if one’s doing exactly the right thing and the problem is that Cloudflare is caching the page or the web server is or… something. Somewhere in my head there is a conversation I want to have with someone who knows exactly what they’re doing on this front where I can say “look, here is the situation, I keep hitting refresh and I never get the new version, please tell me why” and then when they investigate and find out why, I can say “cool, how can we make the devtools be clearer in this situation so I won’t have to ask you next time”…