"""Think of all the crazy things we did pluggin ImageMagick into PHP backed by giant MySQL instances."""
While I agree those were easy to use, I can't think of any crazy/cool things from that era websites.
Most of the cool/useful/nice web stuff is from the Ajax/fast JS/jQuery etc era of late.
"""I recently pulled in some image recognition libs to my app, and it's an extreme struggle keeping a large, legacy, C++ lib from exploding all over a mobile device. We really are stepping far, far, back from the previous trend of writing code as if the metal they run on is but a detail."""
It was never "but a detail", it was just that web development is seldom CPU/Memory-bound. Mobile development in the main is.
Also, if you were trying to do a competent 3D game engine, back in the same era you did PHP/MySQL stuff, you'd see that the PC metal was not "but a detail" at all.
It's also a little contradictory to lament about how easy it was to "plug ImageMagick into PHP backed by giant MySQL instances" and then compare it to the difficulty of not only programming for a mobile device, but also "pulling in some image recognition libs to my app".
Not only you're attempting something much more cpu intensive and difficult than using ImageMagick/PHP for web development, something that could have been just as difficult if not more so back in your web days, but you also try it in a device with less memory/cpu. Something's gotta give, right?
That said, nothing stops you writing plain apps for mobile that just do the same stuff you did on the web. There are plenty of frameworks that basically provide you with a browser view and let you do stuff (Platinum, etc).
Most of the cool/useful/nice web stuff is from
the Ajax/fast JS/jQuery etc era of late
Wikipedia, Blogger, Flickr, a bazillion forums on which I spent countless hours. Ajax/JS/jQuery are cool, however when it comes to usefulness many times they are superfluous. The old Twitter interface was a lot more usable.
web development is seldom CPU/Memory-bound
This is only an impression because the hard work gets done by the database or other external processes that are outside of your web server. Business logic is cheap if you can delegate the actual data processing and when you delegate, of course it's going to be I/O bound. On the whole if you count every component, web applications are the biggest consumers of these resources.
nothing stops you writing plain apps for mobile that
just do the same stuff you did on the web
I agree, you can also have a native mobile interface, while the whole logic is done on server. Like in the case of a chess game, you could have the minimax algorithm (or whatever) on the server, with a push mechanism to notify the client when the move is ready.
While I agree those were easy to use, I can't think of any crazy/cool things from that era websites.
Most of the cool/useful/nice web stuff is from the Ajax/fast JS/jQuery etc era of late.
"""I recently pulled in some image recognition libs to my app, and it's an extreme struggle keeping a large, legacy, C++ lib from exploding all over a mobile device. We really are stepping far, far, back from the previous trend of writing code as if the metal they run on is but a detail."""
It was never "but a detail", it was just that web development is seldom CPU/Memory-bound. Mobile development in the main is.
Also, if you were trying to do a competent 3D game engine, back in the same era you did PHP/MySQL stuff, you'd see that the PC metal was not "but a detail" at all.
It's also a little contradictory to lament about how easy it was to "plug ImageMagick into PHP backed by giant MySQL instances" and then compare it to the difficulty of not only programming for a mobile device, but also "pulling in some image recognition libs to my app".
Not only you're attempting something much more cpu intensive and difficult than using ImageMagick/PHP for web development, something that could have been just as difficult if not more so back in your web days, but you also try it in a device with less memory/cpu. Something's gotta give, right?
That said, nothing stops you writing plain apps for mobile that just do the same stuff you did on the web. There are plenty of frameworks that basically provide you with a browser view and let you do stuff (Platinum, etc).