We use it ourselves for design sessions in our remote team and teachers have been using it in their classrooms. If you find it useful, we'd love to know :)
Could you elaborate on the maintenance costs? We use ProtoBufjs for our own real-time whiteboarding webapp over web sockets, and in the long run having strict schemas has saved us a lot of time. We're a distributed team with different members working on the front and backends, and we frequently refer to our proto files to remember how data is transferred and how it should be interpreted (explained in our proto commented code).
Are the maintenance costs related to debugging unparsable messages? We've almost never had an issue there, so maybe we've just been lucky?
I'm surprised that this is just now news. I received complaints from people participating in our beta trial (http://sketchtogether.com) from as early as October 22nd, 2014 that our website was broken, and it was because of Superfish being installed on their lenovo laptops. When they uninstalled Superfish, our webpage started working again.
Superfish injected a line of code that referenced "sf_main.jsp" from a remote site into all webpages (including ours) that interfered with our code. Here's a pastebin of the sf_main.jsp javascript file it linked to: http://pastebin.com/bZFkfRd5 (I assume the linked code is not copyrighted, if it is, please let me know and I can take it down).
It was such an amazing system and it's unbelievable that this was published in 1963. Too bad it took more than 3 decades before it made it into people's homes.
Too bad about it requiring a phone. I was hoping to be able to ditch my phone and talk with a watch paired to a blue tooth headset. I'll keep dreaming.
I got the Carbon X1 Touch myself, and absolutely love it. I only have two complaints:
(1) my battery only lasts for 2.5 hours in linux on a good day, while it lasts over 6 hours in windows, and
(2) I develop touch-based apps, and ubuntu doesn't broadcast touch events to its browser. The system itself can receive touch events (if you tap three fingers on a window, it triggers the move mode), but the browsers themselves only receive mouse events. The result is that I cannot use pinch-and-zoom on touch-enabled webapps.
If you need those features, you're welcome to have a look at my phd project, http://sdcl.ics.uci.edu/research/calico/, check out the second video. Admittedly, it's a java application rather than a webpage, but a few companies have found it useful so far. The project is available on github here: https://github.com/uci-sdcl/calico.
I work on a medium sized angular webapp (10K+ LOCs), and have spoken to large teams in organizations that build their applications using angular that have 100K+ LOCs, but have not seen an open source application on this scale. Some problem/solutions I've seen:
* Programmers split work by taking ownership on modules, treat modules by other programmers as black boxes, and use bower with a company hosted server to manage dependencies.
* Some programmers I've spoken to have tried using requirejs or bower to manage dependencies, but most I've talked to dislike the overhead this causes.
* Large apps dynamically load routes on-demand. The core angularjs framework is not built for this, but numerous hacks have been put forward by the community to handle dynamic loading of javascript modules, and honestly, it's not that bad. Thankfully, built-in support for dynamic loading of components is on the angular roadmap.
* Personally, I annotate my files such that, for any dynamically injected reference, the reader can directly navigate to the source file. Google closure syntax, browserify, and requirejs also provide this support.
The author interviewed people from 50 different major companies, and found people's use fit within the following:
Category of UML Use, Instances of Declared Current Use
no UML, 35
retrofit, 1
automated code generation, 3
selective, 11
wholehearted, 0
From the conclusion: "The majority of those interviewed simply do not use UML, and those who do use it tend to do so
selectively and often informally."
In my own experience and research, people draw extensively, but have their own shorthand for writing things specific to their domain.
We use it ourselves for design sessions in our remote team and teachers have been using it in their classrooms. If you find it useful, we'd love to know :)