6 ms·

All this to get a feature that was already prevalent 15 years ago in oldschool PHP applications.

translucyd 3y ago
I feel sometimes that we are running in circles in front end development. We had a good thing: Then we burned, step on it, and then recreated it because it was the best way to do things in the end of the day. :(
- kjkjadksj 3y ago
  I feel like this is the inevitability of more and more tooling being released. Eventually there will be so much tooling that its hard to even work effectively as the signal to noise ratio plummets over time.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- fHr 3y ago
  front end is such a shit show these days endless and then stuff runs for 1 month stable and instead of adresing real issues they come up with another rewrite.
- ericmcer 3y ago
  You should really try something like NextJs, all the nightmarish parts of FE development are abstracted away. It makes me hopeful for a future where all the config files and tools are invisible and you just develop applications. All the TS, HMR, SSR, etc. is invisible to you and managing it is the responsibility of the people developing the frameworks.
- hinkley 3y ago
  You should feel that all the time. But it’s not a circle, it’s an arc. If it were a circle, running as fast as you can in one direction would bring you back around to the former. Instead we hit the end of the swing and backpedal until we remember why we were going this direction in the first place.
joshstrange 3y ago
Spoken like someone who doesn't need and/or understand SPA-style features. Look I get it, I've been developing with PHP for close to 2 decades but let's not pretend that PHP+jQuery (or whatever you are using for frontend interaction) is anywhere near as powerful as a SPA+SSR. And yes, not every site needs to be a SPA but there are some sites where that absolutely is the right call and pairing it with SSR can get you "the best of both worlds".
- Aloha 3y ago
  Who does need an SPA?
  - soperj 3y ago
    People who sell advertising for a living.
    - gortok 3y ago
      This is a joke, right?
      - soperj 3y ago
        No. From what I can tell the whole reason for a SPA is so that people don't leave your site. You throw away a lot of good things (like urls to content) so that you can push more ads at people.
        gortok 3y ago
        Ah, I see your argument; SPAs are a preferred way to 'suck folks in' to a page and just have them stay there since they can't navigate in and out to the specific piece of content they want with URLs. That about sums up everything wrong with our industry. Engagement over usefulness.
        em-bee 3y ago
flimsypremise 3y ago
15 years ago a frontend build was not a thing. You managed what few javascript and CSS dependencies you had via the order of the script and style tags in the header. Now a frontend build is a baked in requirement of any user-facing application, so whatever you end up doing in whatever language, you already have that one build to manage. If you choose to build your application in anything other than JS/TS, you are effectively adding an additional build to the project, with all of the associate overhead. If you stick with one language and one build, you are eliminating large swaths of unnecessary complexity right off the bat. Not to mention that you don't have to hire for the additional language for the dev team. Unless there is a legacy system driving the requirements in a different direction, my default application architecture is always going to be server-side React at this point.
- breckenedge 3y ago
  > Not to mention that you don't have to hire for the additional language for the dev team. Or maybe hire people who can code in more than one framework.
  - flimsypremise 3y ago
    You could, but I doubt anyone with budget responsibilities is going to appreciate you making hiring more difficult and expensive.
    - ricardobeat 3y ago
      I hope you realize how depressing this statement is. “Coding in more than one framework” is an extremely low bar to hire for.
- bakuninsbart 3y ago
  User facing in what way? There seem to still be a ton of new RoR or Django projects without react/ or angular out there.
  - 3y ago

I feel sometimes that we are running in circles in front end development. We had a good thing: Then we burned, step on it, and then recreated it because it was the best way to do things in the end of the day. :(

kjkjadksj 3y ago
I feel like this is the inevitability of more and more tooling being released. Eventually there will be so much tooling that its hard to even work effectively as the signal to noise ratio plummets over time.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
fHr 3y ago
front end is such a shit show these days endless and then stuff runs for 1 month stable and instead of adresing real issues they come up with another rewrite.
ericmcer 3y ago
You should really try something like NextJs, all the nightmarish parts of FE development are abstracted away. It makes me hopeful for a future where all the config files and tools are invisible and you just develop applications. All the TS, HMR, SSR, etc. is invisible to you and managing it is the responsibility of the people developing the frameworks.
hinkley 3y ago
You should feel that all the time. But it’s not a circle, it’s an arc. If it were a circle, running as fast as you can in one direction would bring you back around to the former. Instead we hit the end of the swing and backpedal until we remember why we were going this direction in the first place.

joshstrange 3y ago

Spoken like someone who doesn't need and/or understand SPA-style features. Look I get it, I've been developing with PHP for close to 2 decades but let's not pretend that PHP+jQuery (or whatever you are using for frontend interaction) is anywhere near as powerful as a SPA+SSR. And yes, not every site needs to be a SPA but there are some sites where that absolutely is the right call and pairing it with SSR can get you "the best of both worlds".

Aloha 3y ago
Who does need an SPA?
- soperj 3y ago
  People who sell advertising for a living.
  - gortok 3y ago
    This is a joke, right?
    - soperj 3y ago
      No. From what I can tell the whole reason for a SPA is so that people don't leave your site. You throw away a lot of good things (like urls to content) so that you can push more ads at people.
      - gortok 3y ago
        Ah, I see your argument; SPAs are a preferred way to 'suck folks in' to a page and just have them stay there since they can't navigate in and out to the specific piece of content they want with URLs. That about sums up everything wrong with our industry. Engagement over usefulness.
        em-bee 3y ago

flimsypremise 3y ago

15 years ago a frontend build was not a thing. You managed what few javascript and CSS dependencies you had via the order of the script and style tags in the header. Now a frontend build is a baked in requirement of any user-facing application, so whatever you end up doing in whatever language, you already have that one build to manage. If you choose to build your application in anything other than JS/TS, you are effectively adding an additional build to the project, with all of the associate overhead. If you stick with one language and one build, you are eliminating large swaths of unnecessary complexity right off the bat. Not to mention that you don't have to hire for the additional language for the dev team. Unless there is a legacy system driving the requirements in a different direction, my default application architecture is always going to be server-side React at this point.

breckenedge 3y ago
> Not to mention that you don't have to hire for the additional language for the dev team. Or maybe hire people who can code in more than one framework.
- flimsypremise 3y ago
  You could, but I doubt anyone with budget responsibilities is going to appreciate you making hiring more difficult and expensive.
  - ricardobeat 3y ago
    I hope you realize how depressing this statement is. “Coding in more than one framework” is an extremely low bar to hire for.
bakuninsbart 3y ago
User facing in what way? There seem to still be a ton of new RoR or Django projects without react/ or angular out there.
- 3y ago