If you can do server side great: do it. The difficulty is accurately predicting how much JavaScript you'll end up writing. If your client-side JavaScript is comparable in complexity to your SSR you'll eventually end up with the worst of both worlds.
If a client tells me what they want built, I bet I'd be able to roughly guess how much js there's going to be, probably within a few hundred lines for a, say, 3 month project.
The larger the project, the large the margin of error, but still, it's really not that hard for the vast majority of work we do. Or at least I do, e-commerce, enterprise apps, etc.
That sounds logical if you are doing client work with a defined scope. From personal experience working in the startup world, which I imagine a lot of posters on here are, you don't always know what you are building or what the end game is.
I'm not sure that's such a huge problem. HTTP routing provides a wonderful architectural seam so that we can use different solutions for different domains like `/profile` and `/document-editor`. We can create rich client-side experiences without creating a monolithic SPA. And as long as we make sure we have those architectural seams we have the flexibility to decide.
Organizing my HTML into pages is the easy part. The hard part is the rich client-side experience: things like building a sortable/filterable table with a rich datetime picker where the data is displayed dynamically in a chart with zoom/pan capabilities. That's why I build SPAs: I've already bit the bullet to get highly dynamic client-side code, it's just as easy to construct my pages client-side as well.
Having mostly used Angular and React with APIs, I recently wrote a small app with server-side templating and a very small amount of jquery. It was an absolute joy. Especially with webpack it feels like the front-end has become needlessly complex and I'm not sure it has improved quality for users.
I think Phoenix Live View is maybe the most compelling story around this (https://github.com/phoenixframework/phoenix_live_view). I'm moving a side-project from React/SPA to Phoenix live view and it's kind of amazing to get the dev ergonomics of a server-rendered page with the UX benefits of a SPA.
as a user, this is the kind of experience I want on the web. any spa like page should always degrade back to web standards. and it should be lightening fast. and not spin my cpu fan or warm my desk.
Agree completely. My only concern is that so many imitations are attempting to pop up in other languages and you just can’t do it as effectively.
There are so many tradeoffs present that happen to result in the necessary set of functionality to do this efficiently that aren’t easily present outside of the BEAM.
Everything can be done in everything else. The only question is how well it fits, how contorted does it have to be, what comes naturally.
With BEAM, robustness is a special feature. In the BEAM you can kill, restart and replace processes all over the place and everything stays working pretty well, because its structure means everything written for it is designed with that in mind.
In a typical async/await server side application sharing state across clients, killing, restarting and replacing usually means the whole single process containing all the async/await coroutines, and the fancy per-client state you were maintaining is lost.
You can of course serialise state, as well as coordinating it among multiple processes, but that takes more effort than just using async/await in a web app, and often people don't bother. Doing that right can get tricky and it requires more testing for something that doesn't happen often compared with normal requests. So instead, they let the occasional client session see a glitch or need reloading, and deem that no big deal.
It can be done, but you’ll see a lot of weak points. It’s probably worth a blog post to explain it. There are several layers in the language that combine to make this work.
At a high level, is the combination of process isolation, memory isolation, template delivery, websocket capability and resilience on top of all the standard web bits.
It will be really difficult to pull off with a good developer experience and minus several deficiencies outside of the BEAM. Anything’s possible though.
I started this course and the animations/presentation are amazing. some really clear explanations. But the fake cute-sy dialogue and the extra fluff that says how wonderful and amazing and great and FUN liveview is means I didn't get past the first video
Having deployed liveview for an admin dashboard, I gotta say, it really is great FUN, and no-fuss, even if you're slinging together a system that customers never see so you don't care if the code gets a bit knotty, and your datastructures are abjectly awful.
I covered the whole process of building the site for my podcast https://reactor.am in the series.
Note that LiveView still isn't at v1.0 and breaking updates have been common. You'll have a much better with my LV tutorial or anyone else's if you use the exact same library versions we do and upgrade at the same point the tutorial does.
It's not suitable for using the client's computer to mine crypto currencies, doing graphics processing on the client, doing numerical processing on the client or doing anything purely on the client without server interaction.
For things where you generally need a trip to the server anyway, like validations, it's great.
Yup, exactly. If you’re mostly building a client application (or a p2p client-server application!) but it happens to live on the web platform, PLV does not seem like a great fit...at least not this year. Honestly BEAM seems great it ought to be great for that generally!
Maybe if you ran the server portion of PLV in the browser...but then you’re just back at React anyway I suppose.
I've been playing with LiveView myself for personal projects and it is very nice.
One interesting thing is that it makes you consider memory issues again since all your rendered data structures are held in memory in the LiveView process unless they are explicitly cleared after the render with "temporary_assigns". For apps that would have to hold and transfer a lot of data up and down the channel I've ended up using a hybrid of LiveView with divs set to phx-update="ignore" in which I mount React components.
I'd say that's the main (potential) 'problem' with LiveView, alongside latency issues.
In practice, I've usually found that the advantages outweigh the disadvantages when it comes to the former. Beefing up my servers seems like a worthwhile trade-off.
When it comes to latency, or related issues, I find that I'm still so much better off using LV as a basis and 'dropping down' into plain JS or (p)react when I need it.
We recently delivered a project that involved a whole bunch of stuff that LV was a perfect solution for, but also a core bit of functionality that required various kinds of animations. We ended up using LV wherever we could, and piggy-backed on the LV channel (websockets) to handle synchronizing the animation stuff. The actual code to animate things was just plain old JS. Worked like a charm!
I'm still using LiveView in a lot of the other parts of the app - places like signup/signin where the having the form validation seamlessly done server side using changsets is very, very nice. I'm also using in places where I would normally have to expose an api endpoint for CRUD and instead I'm using events and handling it in the LiveView. Again, very nice.
We’ve gone all in and are using it a lot in production. There is one big trade off to consider though: point of presence and global availability. We’re ok, as we’re a UK based website and hosted in GCP europe-west2, but we had devs in NZ for a while, and they said that, understandably, the site was really slow for them due to the latency. Beam has the ability to link instances and have them cluster, so you could do something like that across multiple regions globally, but there is a trade off to consider if you run a global service: you’re trading an over engineering and sync problem, for a potential distributed systems problem if you try and make the same liveview site available performantly in multiple global regions.
It's still not a silver bullet. There's lots of things in a LV driven app where you're still wondering what front-end library to use with it.
Typically you wouldn't use LV to handle:
Menu dropdowns, tooltips, popovers, modals (in some cases), tabs (when you don't want to load the content from the server) or things that change the client side state of something but don't adjust server state. That could be things like a "select all" checkbox toggle where that doesn't do anything on its own other than select or de-select client side check boxes or toggling the visibility of something. There's also things like wanting to copy to the clipboard or initiating stuff to happen on drag / drop (like animations).
Basically you'll still find yourself wanting to use JS with LV. Whether that's Stimulus, Alpine, Vue, jQuery, vanilla JS or something else that's up to you. But I do find most of the above necessary in a lot of web apps I develop.
> It's still not a silver bullet. There's lots of things in a LV driven app where you're still wondering what front-end library to use with it.
> Typically you wouldn't use LV to handle:
> Menu drop dropdowns, tooltips, popovers, modals (in some cases), tabs (when you don't want to load the content from the server) or things that change the client side state of something but don't adjust server state.
My experience is that LiveView is fine for all but the last use case. And while in practice I often don't really need to keep things client-side-only, when I do it's often pretty easy to just write a bit of js and, if necessary, use hooks and events to communicate with the surrounding LiveView(s).
In fact, I vaguely recall that in the early days of LV, the creator himself argued that it should be used for just 'smaller interactive stuff'. Over time, we all discovered that LV does surprisingly well for SPA-type use cases (and as a result we now have stuff like router-level LiveViews (that take over the whole page), live_redirects, url updating, and so on).
> That could be things like a "select all" checkbox toggle where that doesn't do anything on its own other than select or de-select client side check boxes.
Why wouldn't you just keep that within the server-side state LV paradigm? I've done just that in a project I'm working on.
> There's also things like wanting to copy to the clipboard or initiating stuff to happen on drag / drop (like animations).
For those things you write js, yes.
> Basically you'll still find yourself wanting to use JS with LV. Whether that's Stimulus, Alpine, jQuery, vanilla JS or something else that's up to you. But I do find most of the above necessary in a lot of web apps I develop.
Absolutely, but I'm continuously surprised how little of it I need, and how often I /think/ I do just because I haven't quite wrapped my head around the different paradigm.
> My experience is that LiveView is fine for all but the last use case.
I wouldn't want to impose a 50-500ms+ delay on someone to show a menu drop down or a tooltip or most of the other things listed out.
With LV everything involves a server round trip. That's great for when you need to make a round trip no matter what (which is often the case, such as updating your database based on a user interaction), but it creates for very unnaturally sluggish feeling UIs when you use LV for things that you expect to be instant.
Even a 100ms delay on a menu feels off and with a good internet connection if you have a server in NY, you'll get 80-100ms ping times to the west coast of the US or the west coast of Europe.
LV feels amazing on localhost but the internet is global. I still think it's worth minimizing round trips to the server when you can, not because Phoenix and LV can't handle it but because I want my users to have a good experience using the sites I develop.
> My experience is that LiveView is fine for all but the last use case.
>> I wouldn't want to impose a 50-500ms+ delay on someone to show a menu drop down or a tooltip or most of the other things listed out.
It's basically a UX standard that a tooltip only shows up after a few seconds, so that strikes me as a particularly bad example. That said, sure, if instant tooltips are important, a tiny bit of js and a specific class name in your markup would solve it.
> With LV everything involves a server round trip. That's great for when you need to make a round trip no matter what (which is often the case, such as updating your database based on a user interaction), but it creates for very unnaturally sluggish feeling UIs when you use LV for things that you expect to be instant.
Yeah, I do agree on that. While I feel using a tooltip is a bad example, in practice I wouldn't implement tooltips or menus in LiveView. Those would just be solved via some CSS trick or some plain old JavaScript.
> LV feels amazing on localhost but the internet is global. I still think it's worth minimizing round trips to the server when you can, not because Phoenix and LV can't handle it but because I want my users to have a good experience using the sites I develop.
I'll give you that generally I wouldn't use LV for tooltips and popups. But in part because those are really easy to solve without it.
But for /so/ much of the stuff involved in a SPA the latency has not been a problem in practice.
Consider tabbed content. Sure, I could make it all 'instant' by preloading the various bits of content and writing js to switch between these bits. But I can avoid that entirely by preloading those bits in my templates and using LV to switch/update classes. The tiny latency downside is worth the upsides: being able to update the content in those tabs live with no extra code (no API calls, no client-side frameworks, and server-side rendered as a nice bonus!).
My general approach is that I use LV as a default, and then use the 'Hook' system and some custom JS when latency is a concern. In practice that doesn't amount to much. So it's not a silver bullet, but it simplifies so much of what a typical SPA does.
The click would be sent as an event to the server, where the state is changed (setting "active_tab" or something like that). Then the view would be re-rendered (probably only changing a few class names) and the diff sent back down to the client.
Gosh, that feels so inefficient (as a js dev here). Then again... React had it's naysayers for sometime because 1. JSX, 2. nobody saw dom diffing as truly fast enough. But dom diffing is absolutely faster than asking the server to update a classname.
True, in this particular case it does seem inefficient. And of course there's nothing stopping one from just doing this with a bit of js.
But in the bigger picture, the advantages of this approach are huge:
1. no need to maintain state, routing, and so on on the front- and backend, which removes a huge source of complexity. It's all in one place. And if something in the DB is updated, it's trivial to make it live-update the client state. And because of websockets, such an update is almost instant.
2. being able to use the same language (and templating) on server and client (for the most part).
3. the ability to just use regular function calls to retrieve data, and selectively display what you want by using it in templates. No need to set up endpoints for the client, and no need to worry that perhaps accidentally the endpoint might send data down the wire that shouldn't be there (and that you might not notice because the JSX doesn't display it). I think in just the past year I've read about a number of serious data leaks that were basically a result of this.
4. no need (or not as much need) to keep an eye on the js payload. Want to format dates in particular way? Just add the dependency and use it however you like. It's only diff in the output that gets sent to the client!
5. little to no need to deal with a complicated build process.
6. server-side rendering out of the box, and in a simple manner!
7. less taxing on the client. No need for processing templates and a lot of code. Of course, the downside is that the server has to do more work.
Now obviously latency can be a downside, as is (potentially) increased memory and processor usage on the server. It's not a magic solution to everything :). Hell, my last project still needed quite a bit of javascript for some heavy interactivity where latency had to be avoided. But it's still astounding to me how many projects have become drastically simpler with the LiveView-approach!
The future is Next.js with SSR first and selective client side hydration. Ignore the jamstack, it's going to lose and go away. Requiring a JS download first to show a dynamic site is a recipe for bad performance.
Isn't SSR (or even better SSG) the M in JAM? It's a marketing term anyway and it doesn't really need to "lose", we can just talk about the technologies instead.
Next.js gives you a great toolbag to choose from for each challenge, it's definitely going to stay around and keep growing like crazy.
I would also prefer something like Next.js with partial hydration. But what I want in that is probably a much bigger ask: I want the partial hydration to be performed automatically with static analysis. Something like Svelte (real DOM codegen, no need to ship a library to the browser) would be especially nice, but I don’t want to give up JSX. In the end, this is probably well outside the scope of a framework coupled directly with React, and I suspect that if I want it badly enough it’s something I’ll need to build myself.
I'm not sure if we're saying the same thing, by partial hydration I mean only wiring some specific client side components for interactivity. As in only shipping the react components over the wire that need to be rendered on the client for user interaction. Meaning the overall page is vanilla HTML, but some subtrees are React wired components. Complete with state management that can work between all of them. In which case I'm thinking it would be fine to mark components individually as server/client.
Yes, that was what I meant as well. But as I’ve read about the approaches currently available, all of which require manually opting in per component, I’ve had two thoughts:
1. Manually marking a component for hydration likely means shipping the whole structure below as JS, which may hit diminishing returns fairly quickly.
2. At least if you’re using TypeScript, enough is known (or could/should be) to determine which components are truly static. Next.js already has a rudimentary version of this. That kind of analysis could be a huge DX improvement.
You can use much of the J and the A during the SSG stage that then delivers the M to the user. And very user-specific and/or dynamic things will have to remain some sort of generated shell and the content fetched on the client anyway.
I am currently working on projects with Django (jinja2), Laravel (blade), Node (ejs) and Next. I can't possibly understand how so many people in this thread are preferring server rendering frameworks. As soon as you have a non hello world application (= complex state shared across multiple components / page) a SPA application is so much easier and productive. And Next brings this experience back to public facing frontends because it supports prerendering along other things.
My argument for SPAs rests on the completely subjective yet I feel incredibly powerful impact of latency. When anything takes more than 50ms to react, it becomes mentally jarring to the user. Whether it is typing in an SSH session, clicking a menu with a mouse, auto-completing a box, etc - all these things generate a completely different human response and relationship with the application if they get below that threshold of latency. In my experience, it's nearly impossible to get non-SPAs across that threshold for large sections of their functionality, while for SPAs it becomes more or less the default. So people can make all the technical arguments they want, but to me the human factor of that subjective feeling trumps it all.
That's not possible for SPAs outside localhost. Every single SPA i know is clunky, including gmail which is probably one of the most barebones. The lack of visual indication that something is happening or downloading alone is infuriating with SPAs. Most of them reinvent the browser in a very poor substitute that invariably fails to both be practical , and to mimic a native mobile app (i think the latter is the reason for so many SPAs.
>including gmail which is probably one of the most barebones.
And yet, it still uses 130 flipping megabytes of RAM, more than Youtube does, as well as more CPU than Youtube does at idle, as well as requiring several seconds to "start up" when first opening a tab. Ridiculous.
I think gmail is a bit of a parody of itself nowadays. For extra hilarity someday, try pressing "c" for compose as the site is loading. Literally seconds to get a compose window showing.
SPAs are like CGI.. you only notice it when it is bad. I can assure you, you use many SPAs that are not slow and clunky, you just don't realize they are SPAs
I notice all of them , 100% of the time. Twitter has a fairly good one, but even that s very clunky. I'm not saying they are all slow, but they are clunky, jumpy and unpredictable, which in many ways is worse than a webpage like HN that is 100% consistent, but sometimes times out. Predictability for me is more important than pay-it-later responsiveness. E.g. when i press the Pay button i 'm OK with waiting 20 seconds for the payment to process. What's unacceptable is the button standing still, not doing anything until a few seconds later, at which time i ve pressed it 10 times.
Because like other commenters that chimed in, I can notice most SPAs, and all SPAs I've used had annoying performance problems. By problems I don't mean a sudden request that takes half a second, but that every UI interaction feels subtly slow.
I don't know where people get these performance targets of "below 100ms and users won't notice". I notice. I notice if UI responses take longer than two-three animation frames, the same way I notice when a game is running at 20 FPS and not 60 FPS.
Fastmail is laggy in places, but mostly OK. But I'm surprised at you choosing Google Office as an example. Google's office suite is a poster child of slow, clunky SPAs.
It's a crap threshold. 100ms is 10 FPS. You can most definitely tell when something is updating at 10 FPS, vs. 20 FPS (50ms). Movement stops being jarring at ~30 FPS (33.3ms), but you can most definitely tell apart that and 60FPS (16.6ms).
Displaying a loading spinner in under 50ms while waiting for a 500ms request to complete doesn't necessarily build a strong relationship.
SPAs can start off with the good intention of being low-latency and responsive. But when you're backed by a web server, you still have to account for it though optimistic rendering, prefetching, and loading states. Getting it right can be an excellent UX, but it's easy to get very wrong.
Most of these SPAs you speak about have loading spinners, grayed-out placeholders, all sorts of tricks to make it feel like you're in control while the fetch() roundtrip to populate the page data completes. The borders of your screen may not change, but the page filling with elements after a delay can be just as jarring.
If a non-SPA page loads near instantaneously because the client-side rendering isn't bloated, it can feel just as good as an SPA with spinners.
You can also use tools like turbolinks the author recommended, to turn your non-SPA into an SPA.
When anything takes more than 50ms to react, it becomes mentally jarring to the user
Yes, but you often pay a huge penalty on the first page load, which for many use cases is the most important. I'd be so happy with a turbolinks version of GMail.
I've designed and programmed highly interactive SPAs for customers large and small, and the reaction is invariably "I can't believe this is a website, it feels like an app". Being non-technical, they can't put their finger on it, but I know that while the base design plays a part, so does the concrete UI implementation.
I wonder how many of the people crapping on SPAs are actual front-end or full-stack app devs, or otherwise people developing very close to the UX.
I'm sure there are some disgruntled UX devs who are running back to SSR, but when I come to the bimonthly "SPA sucks" thread on HN, for the most part it feels to me as though the critiques are coming from people for whom UX and front-end development are secondary concerns.
> Being non-technical, they can't put their finger on it
This is an interesting perspective. To me, SPAs blur the line between what's happening locally and server-side, so my impatience with slow functions on an SPA page is much greater than the same thing happening on a SSR page. Maybe it's just my conditioning to expect things on a single page to work much quicker as opposed to moving between pages.
IMO, well-designed SPAs should make use of the context-switching function of a complete page fetch in situations where the user might need to wait a relatively longer time for something to load instead of loading bars/spinners.
Our app (https://domestica.app/login) is a pretty good (IMO) example of a blazing fast SPA. It uses Mithril and copious amounts of chunking to make the bundle size extremely small.
On my browser (Firefox, on OSX) it loads /loading then /login. When I go back, that takes me back to /loading, which forwards me to /login again immediately.
Going back requires holding down the back button so I can skip that history record. Illustrated: https://imgur.com/a/zFaGw4a
(Quite a few sites screw this up. It's very annoying.)
This is great, thank you for sharing. We primarily test in Chrome which doesn't seem to display this for whatever reason. Should be an easy fix to remove the history for the loading page.
This is one of the worst SPAs I've ever seen, simply because it causes an infinite redirect loop when clicking the back button and/or tampers with the browser history to make using the back button impossible.
Just tried the app and immediately found the typical SPA bugs and quirks:
- tried to add a recipe and nothing happened for so long (3-5 seconds) that I thought it was broken. Then suddenly the add recipe form finally appeared. Blazing fast! On your dev laptop maybe.
- click payee, nothing happens. URL changes though. God I hate SPAs
- adding an item to your shopping list causes a 'item added' popup to appear. Over the add item button so you can't add another item without dismissing the popup. It's probably only an issue on mobilr, but this popup is only necessary because it's a SPA
- I'm on the 'create shopping category page'. Try and click the 3 dot thing in the top right. The new menu appears underneath the body of the page...
- on the recipe page, you can click the M? button and it displays a link about 'markdown'. Click the link, it takes you to a blank page, which then redirects back to the homepage after a second or two. Bye-bye all your existing input
- this is more of a bug, but if you try and use markdown in the directions text box for recipes, you can't. Start with a # and all your input just disappears (Firefox mobile)
A few other comments I'd add:
- Get a designer, or maybe buy an off the shelf design. That green is err, not nice. The design looks like a developer made it. I'm not great either but you can get a decent design, based on bootstrap or whatever, for like $50 and just adapt it. There are even free designsz like AdminLTE
- why are the top corners of the input boxes rounded, but the bottom corners square?
- Every time I go to the login screen, the logo pops in later than the rest of the screen. And then the Google login pops in even later. I'm on my mobile so can't check, but that screams bad browser cache settings on your images/static assets
- why are the + buttons slightly elliptical instead of round? Looks odd
I generally like the idea behind the app though, though won't use it as it's all in $s. I wonder how much traction you're going to get though as it's going to be really intensive setting it all up
Thank you for the feedback! We'll take a look at these, especially the recipe form. For the shopping list alert issue, you should be able to dismiss the alert but I see where you're coming from. Regarding the colors, you can set whatever color scheme you want under your account settings. The images have always given us trouble, they should be cached but the painting seems like it occurs after load for some reason (I think it has to do with auto height/width?). It's annoying, and will be prioritized soon.
could you comment on how a cursory use of your 'blazing fast SPA' apparently has multiple serious issues and whether this is enough to warrant a paradigm-shift re your belief on how awesome SPAs are? All this almost feels like a parody an anti-SPA advocate would write.
To add: clicking + on the wiki page does nothing and inexplicably calls out to the https://domestica.app/api/v1/budget/payees endpoint resulting in HTTP error - whilst the UI stays silent and displays nothing.
> they also wholeheartedly embrace the thing everyone tries to avoid: mutable state on the server.
For most apps in Phoenix LiveView, it's probably best to think of this as a "relatively smart caching layer". Keeping state on the client invokes distributed state concens anyways, and in the case of the Phoenix, at least the VM is well-equipped with the relevant primitives to make distributed state easy, especially. Basically the only cost you have to pay is if latency is a big deal, you are making a trip back and forth to the server, which could be 100s of milliseconds or more in bad situations... Or even really bad situations, like driving under a tunnel, or being in some stretches of subway.
well there is also React.NET which actually can use razor pages to include react components. pretty neat. also there is blazor which works with websockets and pushes html to clients.
I used Turbolinks for the first time on a new Rails app about 2 years ago and was floored by the impact - it felt like a SPA in terms of no page loads and overall speed.
I'm convinced that this is the solution for the majority of use-cases, combined with selective usage of either React components or something like Stimulus where you need more sophisticated UI components.
The missing link, IMHO, is the lack of client side SQL and a sync mechanism. IndexDB is okay, but nobody is going to use it server side. So you kind of always have to end up writing things twice.
> I think the idea is that IndexedDB acts as a more lower level store that you can build higher level abstractions over, for example PouchDB.
AFAIK, the problem was that vendors couldn't agree on which version of SQL/Sqlite they would have to support and nobody wanted to write a SQL spec. MS wanted to use SQL Compact, but it's mainly Mozilla's fault if the spec was dropped. The same Mozilla that dragged its feet for years when it comes to implementing some aspects of web components...
But it was a terrible decision IMHO because indexedDB doesn't do what a relational database does and it considerably hurt the development of complex mobile web apps, and now Safari on IOS AFAIK removed support for WebSQL. WebSQL was a fantastic tool for web apps that could be entirely cached on a mobile device (SQL can do a lot).
There is no realistic replacement. Even using Sqlite compiled to WASM has a lot of issues (mainly performances and data persistence).
To this day I don't know a single efficient and performance RDBMS equivalent to Sqlite built on top of IndexedDB. Mozilla certainly didn't build one.
Meteor.js maybe, not sure of its focus nowaday, back when I played around with it, you had basically a MongoDB that you could query and mutate on the client, everything was then synced via a pub/sub system with the server.
IMO, TurboLinks + service workers are the way to go.
Not many people know this, but a service worker (previously called "local server") allows you to run a little web server in the user's browser that intercepts requests to your own web site. (There's no open IP port.)
The service-worker web server can proxy requests to the remote server, and even build/store entire pages on the client side, enabling offline support. Service workers also have access to a local database, IndexedDB, running in the user's browser.
You can build a very fast web experience this way. You can easily cache individual pieces of a web page and glue them all together.
Strongly agreed that service workers have a ton of potential here. But I’m still waiting for there to be some kind of killer framework that crosses the bridge between worker and window, saving lots of main thread processing, etc... MessageChannels are quite low level so I imagine it would need some abstraction. But still, very powerful. I’m imagining some kind of Svelte-like thing that creates the whole page worker-side, then generates minimal window-side JS to hydrate the components that’ll actually change. Of course I’d make it myself, but... oh, look over there...
(IMO they should still be called local servers, or server workers perhaps. Service worker is too vague)
I'm working on something like this. Not really a framework though. More of a hodgepodge of JS that I've written and the front end logic would be something like HTMX/Behavior.js style of coding. It will be a progressively enhanced approach to writing a SPA so you could have no JS and it would still work! Or, if you have a modern browser it would work offline. We'll see if I ever finish it :-)
I'm doing a bit of a rewrite right now so this flexibility will come soon.
Is this the same model meteor.js uses? I seem to recall their system maintains a mini-database on the client side and syncs it with the main server through a pub-sub model.
Yes. At least it can use service workers.
Meteor uses MongoDB on the backend, and minimongo client side. Those two are synced over their DDP protocol IIRC.
I miss meteor. It was such a great framework and promise. Not for big sites really, but for mock-ups, internal sites ect.
A while ago I started to look at it again. The drivers behind the project was essentially asking for input on what was preventing people from using the framework.
The current state of the project is/was OK, except for the fact that it was hold down by all the guides and howtos referring to previous versions. It was not well documented what current best practices to follow, what to use as replacements for deprecated dependencies ect.
Is ESI in Service Workers anything you’ve tried? A bit mind blown, never thought of that. Been putting of SW due to all horror stories of people bricking their sites basically
Maybe this is more suited to stackoverflow but, how do you load with turbolinks when the two pages use different assets? Let's say each page have different js script tags.
I've always felt this problem from the first time I touched Angular. It was just so much more complex and fragile without actually a lot of benefit unless you wanted to make a really interactive async application like Google Docs or Facebook Chat.
When SPA's became the norm and even static web pages needed to be build with React, developing became more and more inefficient. I saw whole teams struggling to build simple applications and wasting months of time, while these used to be developed within a couple of weeks with just 1 or 2 developers, on proven server side opinioated frameworks. But that was no longer according to best practices and industry standards. Everything needed to be SPA, micro services, distributed databases, Kubernetes etc. These components and layers needed to be glued together by trial and error.
I am really happy that common sense is starting to return and more developers are starting to realize that integrated end to end frameworks are very useful for a lot of real life application development scenario's.
> I've always felt this problem from the first time I touched Angular. It was just so much more complex and fragile without actually a lot of benefit unless you wanted to make a really interactive async application like Google Docs or Facebook Chat.
It sounds crazy to say that now but Angular became big because it was actually quite lightweight compared to other JS frameworks of this era, declarative 2 way databinding was cool, it was compatible with jQuery (thus its widget ecosystem) and it was also developed with testing in mind. So it was easy to move jQuery projects to Angular ones, and developers cared about this aspect and it helped organize code quite a bit. Angular 2 on the other hand never made sense and it was a solution looking for problem.
React and JSX came along and allowed developers to use JS classes when a lot of browsers didn't support them. And unidirectional dataflow was all at rage. It was always the right solution of course, but I never heard about DOM diffing before that which to me is the main appeal to React. To this date, HTML API still do not have a native(thus efficient) DOM diffing API which is a shame.
> When SPA's became the norm and even static web pages needed to be build with React, developing became more and more inefficient. I saw whole teams struggling to build simple applications and wasting months of time, while these used to be developed within a couple of weeks with just 1 or 2 developers, on proven server side opinionated frameworks. But that was no longer according to best practices and industry standards. Everything needed to be SPA, micro services, distributed databases, Kubernetes etc. These components and layers needed to be glued together by trial and error.
IMHO the problem isn't React and co or even SPA. In fact writing an REST/Web API should be easier than writing a server-side generated HTML website (no need for templating language, ugly form frameworks,...). The problem is the horrible and complex NodeJS/NPM backed asset compilation pipelines and build tools that these framework often require in a professional setting, which incur a lot of complexity for very little gain.
In fact writing an REST/Web API should be easier than writing a server-side generated HTML website (no need for templating language, ugly form frameworks,...).
Why is that easier? It's more work, you are now rendering two views instead of one, a JSON one(server) and HTML one(in the client) with all the JSON encoding/decoding that it entails. You are still using a templating language and, dealing with forms in React is more cumbersome than doing it server-side.
separation of concerns, easier testability, easier mocking..., the thing is especially in more complex applications the code that generates/validates the data and the code that displays them are usually written by two different people.
nowadays once the json schema design is settled, they can work in parallel, each of them can test their parts without needing the other and the merges can be simpler, because the parts do work more or less stand-alone.
> React and JSX came along and allowed developers to use JS classes
Nitpick, but I doubt that was the reason developers are flocking to React back then. In the beginning browsers didn't support JavaScript classes and neither did React. You fake them by using a function known as React.createClass instead. There was also no transpilation required, as JSX was optional. In fact React was always about unidirectional data flow, and reasoning about state -> DOM elements rather than reasoning about changes to the DOM.
> Everything needed to be SPA, micro services, distributed databases, Kubernetes etc. These components and layers needed to be glued together by trial and error.
This is a major problem with our industry. Unfortunately, the people with the power to curb this trend have their paycheck depend on it continuing.
As a company, you are incentivised to have a large tech team to appear credible and raise funding, so you hire a CTO and maybe some engineering managers. Their career in turn benefits from managing large amounts of people and solving complex technical problems (even if self-inflicted), so they’ll hire 10x the amount of engineers the task at hands truly requires, organise them in separate teams and build an engineering playground that guarantees their employment and gives them talking points (for conferences or the seemingly-mandatory engineering blog or in interviews for their next role) about how they solve complex problems (self-inflicted, as a side-effect of an extremely complex stack with lots of moving parts). Developers themselves need to constantly keep up to date, so they won’t usually push back on having to use the latest frontend framework, and even if they do, that decision is out of their hands and they’ll just get replaced or not hired to begin with.
In the end, AWS and the cloud providers are laughing all the way to the bank to collect their (already generous) profits, now even more inflated by having their clients use 10x the amount of compute power that the business problem would normally require.
Maybe the issue is the seemingly-infinite amounts of money being invested into tech companies of dubious value, and the solution would be to get back to Earth as to have some financial pressure coming from up top that incentivises using the simplest solution to the problem at hand?
This is the main reason I refuse to entertain going perm in the tech sector. The amount of superfluous infrastructure and unquestioned use of SPA's is just an overwhelming time sink. I would honestly rather work with some 2-bit company's legacy PHP than this mountain of crap.
For what it's worth, once you are proficient in the full end-to-end, navigating it is pretty easy, IMHO.
It just takes years and lots of room to do basically nothing, and if something meaningfully shifts, you need a while to get back up to speed.
I'm not saying it's efficient, or that you should dive in, but I did want to throw out there that there is a light at the end of the tunnel. People using React.js aren't flailing about in the dark the whole time.
Food for thought: the tech sector is much larger than the trendy dumpster fire of web development. You don't have to work at some startup on some website. There is still lots of real programming to be done.
The problem that nobody knows whether something will become the next Google Docs. Transitioning to an SPA from something like jQuery is basically a complete rewrite.
To be willing to not use an SPA, you need to be willing to exclude certain options from day 1. Find me a product manager willing to do that.
> nobody knows whether something will become the next Google Docs
How many times has it actually happened that some scrappy startup has 1) became the next big thing and 2) not being at the edge of over-engineering actually killed it or significantly impacted its revenue? This just feels like wishful thinking.
Also keep in mind that even if you were on track to become the next Google Docs, this means your current product is usually good enough as-is and gives you time (and $$$) to improve it.
I'm not sure that using React or another JS framework counts as 'being at the edge of over-engineering'.
I agree with the rest of your point - the value of the product to end-users has little to no correlation with the underlying technology choices, which is a pretty controversial statement, but one that I think is true. A customer doesn't care if you built it in React, in one Perl file, or if you're sacrificing goats to retain the minimum requisite levels of dark magic to keep the system running. If it solves their problem they'll keep giving you money for goats.
It depends on what the objective is. I've seen plenty of project where React was used just to have it as a buzzword, but otherwise provided no functionality and actually slowed development down and ended up being less reliable (we had to - poorly - reimplement behaviors like validation, pagination, etc that our backend framework already had for free).
Another view of this problem, evolving a SPA of CRUD app into Google Docs may also be a complete rewrite.
IMO when the time comes and your product is used well, you may be ready financially and technically to do a complete rewrite. Otherwise maybe the current functioning application is better if the rewrite isn't justified.
Kubernetes is the biggest joke. I remember working with a sysadmin who worked for The Guardian provisioning servers remotely as demand spiked. This is pre-AWS. He used Puppet and remarked that you would only ever need what he was using for managing massive fleets of servers. Then Kubernetes and Docker arrived, which were intended for even bigger deployments in data centres. Before you knew it, just as with SPA's, Kubernetes and Docker became the new requirements for web devs working on simple apps.
Also never underestimate the power of a single bare-metal server. Today everyone seems to be in the clouds (pun intended) and has seemingly accepted the performance of terrible, underprovisioned VMs as the new normal.
Stackoverflow -- the website that every developer uses probably all the time -- is an example of a site running on a very small number of machines efficiently.
I'd rather have their architecture than 100's of VMs.
For those who are discouraged by the massive complexity of Kubernetes/Terraform and various daunting system design examples of big sites, remember you can scale to a ridiculous levels (barring video or heavy processing apps) with just vertical scaling.
Before you need fancy Instagram scale frameworks, you’ll have other things to worry about like appearing in front of congress for a testimony :-)
This is indeed the standard example I refer to to prove my point, and all my personal projects follow this model whenever possible. The huge advantage in addition to performance is that the entire stack is simple enough to fit in your mind, unlike Kubernetes and its infinite amount of moving parts and failure modes.
I share the general HN sentiment over microservices complexity but just to play devil's advocate...
I suspect that server cost in this case is asymptotic. If the (monetary) cost of SE's architecture is F(n) and your typical K8s cluster is G(n), where n is number of users or requests per second, F(n) < G(n) only for very large values of n. As in very large.
In essence, the devil's advocate point I'm making is that maybe development converges towards microservices because cloud providers make this option cheaper than traditional servers. We would gladly stay with our monoliths otherwise.
I tried to contrive a usage scenario to illustrate this but you know the problem with hypotheticals. And without even a concrete problem domain to theorize on, I can't even ballpark estimate compute requirements. Would love to see someone else's analysis, if anyone can come up with one.
I can't recall reading much on how going for 'the cloud' or 'serverless' saved anyone money. On the other hand, I've read my fair share of horror stories about how costs ballooned and going for the old-fashioned server/VPS ended up being much, much cheaper.
The main argument in favor of the 'cloud' is that it's easier to manage (and even that is often questioned).
Microservices will add latency because network calls are much slower than in-process calls.
Microservices, as an architectural choice, are most properly chosen to manage complexity - product and organizational - almost by brute force, since you really have to work to violate abstraction boundaries when you only have some kind of RPC to work with. To the degree that they can improve performance, it's by removing confounding factors; one service won't slow down another by competing for limited CPU or database bandwidth if they've got their own stack. If you're paying attention, you'll notice that this is going to cost more, not less, because you're allocating excess capacity to prevent noisy neighbour effects.
Breaking up a monolith into parts which can scale independently can be done in a way that doesn't require a microservice architecture. For example, use some kind of sharding for the data layer (I'm a fan of Vitess), and two scaling groups, one for processing external API requests (your web server layer), and another for asynchronous background job processing (whether it's a job queue or workers pulling from a message queue or possibly both, depends on the type of app), with dynamic allocation of compute when load increases - this is something where k8s autoscale possibly combined with cluster autoscaling shines. This kind of split doesn't do much for product complexity, or giving different teams the ability to release parts of the product on their own schedule, use heterogeneous technology or have the flexibility to choose their own tech stack for their corner of the big picture, etc.
I'm not sure if we're on the same page here. When I said "cloud providers make this option cheaper than traditional servers" I meant it as in the pricing structure/plans of cloud providers. That's why I tried to contrive a scenario to make a better point. Meanwhile your definition of cost seems to center on performance and org overheads a team might incur.
You say that serverless will cost more "to prevent noisy neighbor effects"...but that is an abstraction most cloud providers will already give you. Something you already pay your provider for. So my DA point now is, is it cheaper to pay them to handle this or is it cheaper to shell out your own and manage manually?
> You say that serverless will cost more "to prevent noisy neighbor effects"...but that is an abstraction most cloud providers will already give you
I actually wasn't talking about serverless at any point - I understand that term to mostly mean FaaS and don't map it to things like k8s without extra stuff on top, which is closer to where I'd position microservices - a service is a combo of data + compute, not a stateless serverless function. But I agree we're not quite talking about the same things. And unfortunately I don't care enough to figure out how to line it up. :)
Org factors rather than cloud compute costs are why you go microservice rather than monolith was my main point, I think.
I haven't looked for a while but Plenty Of Fish (POF) also ran on the same infrastructure and the same framework - ASP.Net. Maybe ASP.Net is particularly suited to this approach?
What about interpreted languages? I was taught a Python web server can do $NUMCPUS+1 concurrent requests and therefore 32 1 CPU VM will perform as well as a 32 CPU VM.
Kubernetes has been great for us and is much easier to manage over time than servers. There’s an adoption cliff, but I’d take kube over spinning your servers with puppet any day.
Hell I might even run kube if I was running bare metal. Declarative workloads are amazing.
Kubernetes is overkill for most applications that's true, but Docker is awesome because it solves almost all of the "it works on my machine, doesn't work in prod" and "it worked yesterday, doesn't work today" issues and isn't that hard to adopt.
Anecdotally I find the opposite to be true. I've been writing frontend code for over a decade, but I've never moved faster and wrote less buggy code than now. Is that because I've become a better developer? Sure, a little bit. But by and large, I don't believe that ultimately is the reason. I think it's the maturity in the technology. My growth as a programmer is hardly linear and the past 5 years have not matched the growth I achieved in my first 5. Frontend tooling has never been better than it is today.
What I believe, is that the bar to build web applications has been lowered, and there are more programmers than today than ever before. You have people who are not experts in frontend development and javascript trying to build complex UIs and applications. So you take this person who doesn't have the requisite experience and put them to work on a paradigm with a lot of depth (frontend) using frameworks that are really simple and easy to get started with, but compound problems as they are misused.
Another factor is that since SPAs are stateful, complexity mounts aggressively. Instead of a refresh on a stateless page every few seconds, one page causes bugs that rear their head for the duration of the session. These inexperienced people are put in charge of designing codebases that don't scale and become spaghetti. But when designed properly, these problems are largely negated.
I'm not advocating that SPAs are the solution to all problems. I think there's gross overuse of SPAs across the industry, but that is not an indictment of SPAs themselves. That is someone choosing the wrong technology to solve the active problem.
With respect to angular (1, I never touched 2) specifically, I always found it extremely overengineered, poorly designed, with terrible APIs. But that's a problem with that specific framework and says nothing at all about SPAs at all.
> Frontend tooling has never been better than it is today.
What's the library or design pattern to consume a REST API in React or any of the mainstream front-end frameworks? The only thing I'm aware of is Ember Data but Ember is apparently not cool anymore, and I couldn't find a suitable replacement.
I'm asking because in all the projects I've been involved with, consuming the backend API always felt like a mess with lots of reinventing the wheel (poorly) and duplication of code. I can't believe in 2020 there's not some kind of library I can call that will give me my backend resources as JSON and transparently handle all the caching, pagination, error handling (translate error responses to exceptions), etc and people have to do all this by hand when calling something like Axios.
In contrast, Django REST Framework handles all that boilerplate for me and allows me to jump right into writing the business logic. It's insane that ~30 lines of code with DRF (https://www.django-rest-framework.org/#example) gives me a way to expose RESTful endpoints for a database model to the web with authentication, pagination, validation, filtering, etc in a reusable way (these are just Python classes after all) but the modern front-end doesn't have the client equivalent of this.
The graphql frameworks - like Apollo - give you that. I haven't used it. For basic caching the state management frameworks work pretty well, but it is a lot of layers when you add Redux or Vuex to your stack. It works well for us though and I find it much easier to reason about than the old jquery spaghetti code style.
I hear you. I find myself needing to reinvent the wheel far too often to traverse the boundary between the client and server. I also feel that it shouldn’t be this hard. Apollo client and relay solve this problem for GraphQL APIs (quite nicely IMO). What’s missing is an Apollo client for non-GraphQL APIs.
> I'm asking because in all the projects I've been involved with, consuming the backend API always felt like a mess with lots of reinventing the wheel (poorly) and duplication of code. I can't believe in 2020 there's not some kind of library I can call that will give me my backend resources as JSON and transparently handle all the caching, pagination, error handling (translate error responses to exceptions), etc and people have to do all this by hand when calling something like Axios.
If you look at 20 REST API's you'll probably see 30 different patterns for pagination, search/sort, error responses, etc. There have been a couple attempts to standardize REST such as OData but I think it's safe to say that they haven't been very successful. It's kind of challenging to build standard reusable front end tools when everyone builds back ends differently.
You have the concept of data adapters which would be clients for your API (you can make a custom one if extending the existing ones isn't an option) and the rest of the application just interacts with the equivalent of database models without ever having to worry about fetching the data. You could swap the data adapter without having to change the rest of the code.
We seem to have lost this with the move to React though, and even the hodgepodge of libraries doesn't provide a comparable replacement.
Haven’t used it but aren’t there things that can connect to a swagger API spec and do some of the heavy lifting for you? I agree that the network layer in frontend is tedious to implement, things like GraphQL and Apollo attempt raise the abstraction level. What I would really like to see is something even more abstracted, e.g a wrapper around indexdb you can write to that syncs periodically over websockets to your server, more similar to the patterns we use on mobile.
You're right Pouch completely slipped my mind, it's a great solution. But what about something more generic on the backend that wasn't database specfic, some sync engine you could put in front of whatever database you wanted. Can you do something like this with Pouch?
> What's the library or design pattern to consume a REST API in React or any of the mainstream front-end frameworks?
For React, its out of scope; anything that you can use in JS for this can be used. If you are using a state management library, that's probably more relevant to your selection here than React is.
REST is also too open-ended for a complete low-friction solution, but, e.g., if its swagger/openapi, there's tools that will do almost the entire thing for you with little more than the spec.
> The only thing I'm aware of is Ember Data but Ember is apparently not cool anymore, and I couldn't find a suitable replacement.
Ember Data is definitely a valid choice. It may not be hyped right now, but that has little to do with utility or use in the real world.
> These inexperienced people are put in charge of designing codebases that don't scale and become spaghetti.
I think this is one area where front end tooling can be painful for the average dev. The bar to writing idiomatic JS for a given framework can get pretty high quickly, especially when you look at some of the really popular tools out there (i.e. redux).
Front end work has become so much harder to grok because the patterns around things like state management still have a lot of warts. The terminology of redux drives me crazy because it’s really difficult to explain things like reducers.
What most people have in mind as "idiomatic JS" isn't that. It's usually meant to refer to some patterns that appeared and started getting popular around 8 years ago. And often, code written in this not-idiomatic way works _against_ the language and/or the underpinnings of the Web in general. It's just that the circles promoting the pseudo-idioms have outsized and seemingly inescapable influence.
The question asking for clarification is itself vague. Examples of which part?
Look at JS that's written for serious applications today, identify the stuff that you'd label as "idiomatic", and then look at code that was written 10 years ago for serious applications, and see if it matches what your conception of "idiomatic JS" is. Good references for the way JS was written for high-quality applications without the negative influence of the new idioms (because they didn't exist yet): the JS implementing Firefox and the JS implementing the Safari Web Inspector.
Examples of how "idiomatic JS" is often written by people who are working against the language instead of with it:
- insistence on overusing triple equals despite the problems that come with it
- similarly, the lengths people go to to treat null and undefined as if they're synonymous
- config parameter hacks and hacks to approximate multiple return values
- `require`, NodeJS modules, and every bundler (a la webpack) written, ever
- `let self = this` and all the effort people go through not to understand `this` in general (and on that note, not strictly pure JS, but notice how often the `self` hack is used for DOM event handlers because people refuse to understand the DOM EventListener interface)
- every time people end up with bloated GC graphs with thousands of unique objects, because they're creating bespoke methods tightly coupled via closure to the objects that they're meant for because lol what are prototypes
These "idioms" essentially all follow the same "maturation" period: 1. A problem is encountered by someone who doesn't have a solid foundation 2. They cross-check notes with other people in the same boat, and the problem is deemed to have occurred because of a problem in the language 3. A pattern is adopted that "solves" this "problem" 4. Now you have N problems
People think of this stuff as "idiomatic JS" because pretty much any package that ends up on NPM is written this way, since they're all created by people who were at the time trying to write code like someone else who was trying to write code like the NodeJS influencers who are considered heroes within that particular cultural bubble, so it ends up being monkey-see-monkey-do almost all the way down.
Hi, I'm also a new JS coder, but I'd like to avoid becoming one of "those people" you're talking about. I've been struggling with exactly what you mention - how to find out the "correct" way to apply patterns/do relatively complex things, but all I get on search results are Medium articles written by bootcamp grads.
Can you recommend any sources of truth/books that can guide down the right path? Of course I'll be going through all the things you mention but I'm just curious if there's somewhere I can get the right information besides just reading through Firefox code, for example.
And Crockford’s JavaScript: The Good Parts. Although and older book, JavaScript fundamentals never change and it describes a lot of those forgotten foundations.
Redux is not idiomatic JavaScript though. It’s trying to make JavaScript immutable and have adt which it doesn’t. If you use elm, reasonml, rescript, etc this pattern is a lot easier to implement than with JavaScript.
A good starting point to explaining reducers is that you are reducing two things into one.
A redux reducer:
The action and the current state reduce into the new state.
And of course it doesn't matter how many reducers or combined reducers your state uses - they're all ultimately just doing this.
This also works for Array.prototype.reduce(). You're reducing two things into one.
The concept of a reducer isn’t the hard part of Redux... it’s designing your state, organizing actions/reducers/selectors, reducing (no pun intended...) boilerplate, dealing with side effects and asynchrony, etc.
I definitely agree you, F.E Tools has gotten a lot more mature and we have a lot further to go as well.
I'm primarily a backend developer and I think in general backend developers makes for "poor fronted devs". I'm talking about those "occasional" times the backend-dev needs to do some f.e dev work. Just because they don't know the tech as well, best practises and spend as much time with it as a dedicated F.E Dev. jQuery code written by the "occasional front-end dev" is kinda horrific in many cases.
Now please internet hear me. I'm not saying you can't write bad code in a JS-Framework. I'm saying it's usually less often and less bad - especially for non-dedicated f.e devs
Like crossing a street, just looking left and right won't guarantee you to be safe in your crossing, but it damn near makes it less probable.
If you are a shop with mostly backend-devs and don't want to invest in a F.E dev, you definitely should look into a js-framework.
*Svelte is always good start very small and bare bones.
> If you are a shop with mostly backend-devs and don't want to invest in a F.E dev, you definitely should look into a js-framework.
That matches in my experience.
I worked in a shop with only backend developers and the frontend was an absolute buggy mess of jQuery on top of bootstrap. After migrating most of it to Vue I taught it to the team and all the experienced-but-frontend-shy developers started producing great frontend code by themselves.
>What I believe, is that the bar to build web applications has been lowered,
Yes, the bar to build web applications has been lowered. We can all build something on the level of GMail now.
The ability to build websites has been crippled, because you are often forced to build the sites using the tools suited to applications. As you and both the parent comment seem to agree on.
> Frontend tooling has never been better than it is today.
eh. Swing in its golden age run circle around what we have now. Granted it's old tech now that we settled for in-browser delivery, but still:
- look and feels could do theming you can only dream of with css variables/scss
- serialize and restore gui states partially or whole, including listeners
- value binding systems vue can only dream of
- native scrollers everywhere you could style and listen to without the rendered complaining about passive handlers.
- layout that didn't threw a fit about forced reflows
- unhappy with the standard layouts? build your own one as needed
- debug everything, including the actual render call that put an image where it is
- works the same in all supported os
browsers are an insufferable environment to work within compared to that, css is powerful and all but you get a system you can only work by inference, and were everything interferes with everything else by default, which works great to style a document and is a tragedy in an app with many reusable nested components.
Not to be mean, but I worked with Swing for ten years and it was absolute crap. Constantly dealing with resizing “collapsars”, GBLs, poor visual compatibility with the host OS, a fragile threading model and piles and piles of unfixed bugs and glitches was a nightmare. It might have worked if you had a specific end user environment but it was a PITA for anything else, and deployment was even harder.
There are a few things I definitely miss from my 20 years as a Java dev, but the half assed and under funded Swing UI is not among them.
but it's not like it was that worse than flex bugs ( https://codepen.io/sandrosc/pen/YWQAQO still does render differently in chrome than firefox - which one is wrong is immaterial)
But HTML/CSS/JS aren't anywhere near good enough to build GUIs of any complexity by themselves, so everyone layers tons of stuff on top. And then those ... those, people have plenty of complaints about too. But if they didn't use them those complaints would migrate to the underlying framework.
I mean, Swing may have had a fragile threading model (not sure what you mean by that really), but HTML doesn't have one at all. Not great!
I agree with you 100%, and was really just addressing the “swing is awesome” statement in the GP. I’ll take HTML etc over Swing any day, but I’m sure there are nicer alternatives if your deployment environment is native, e.g. SwiftUI (which I have no experience with)
There are plenty of things wrong with HTML & friends, await/async and webpack being my personal hair removers, but if we set that aside and just talk about the DOM as the API for the UI, it’s very robust, well documented and widely available. I don’t love it, but it works.
HTML was never meant for building apps. We took a square peg (document markup language) and jammed it into a round hole (app development.) Most of the problems and frustrations with web development go back to this.
We've been using the wrong tool for the job for over 2 decades. Now it's everywhere and nobody knows any better. It's probably too late now.
Yeah, there is some overuse of SPAs I agree, but havent anyone in this thread worked in older java monoliths with JSP or even good old Struts framework?? THEN you can see what inefficient development looks like.
I also wonder how much of the SPA trend by mega corps was about shifting compute “client side” to save money on infrastructure. It’s kinda like modern data warehouses where storage/compute is now so cheap you do ELT and not ETL anymore. I probably wouldn’t do an SPA today unless I really had to.
When SPA's became the norm and even static web pages needed to be build with React
I'm in a weird situation where I'm contracting into one organisation and they've contracted me out to another. The first organisation know me as a senior dev/architect with 15 years experience in a niche domain. The second organisation see me as brand new to them and despite paying an embarrassing day rate are giving me noddy UI tweaks to do. Extracting myself is proving to be slow somehow.
Anyway, they wanted a webapp with a couple of APIs and nothing on the page than a button, the authenticated username and a line of text. Clicking the button opts you in/out of a service and the text changes depending on the state. The sort of thing people go to once, maybe twice.
I used a mustache template on the server side to populate the values and I didn't even bother with any javascript, just did an old school form submission to the API when the button was clicked and a redirect back to the page.
It was tiny but, obviously it was decided "we should be using a more modern framework" - code for React. It was the more word that got to me, as if there was an equivalent, dated framework I'd used. I didn't put up a fight partly because I was new to the team and figured they were hot on React and I wasn't. Somehow, they made a complete hash of it, they couldn't even figure out how to get all their inline styles (the only styles they used) working without help.
I guess it's just those classics; people want to learn the hot new thing as they see it, their managers are happy that they've heard a buzzword they recognise and then everything becomes a nail for their new hammer.
Every time that sort of thing has happened to me it's been because there's some grand plan to build out more features that the people on the frontline don't know about. The plan rarely materializes but the idea that the foundation should be built in a way that supports it isn't completely stupid.
It’s not stupid, no, but a “supporting foundation” is a largely just a seductive metaphor. It says, “Clearly software is like a building. Every building needs a solid foundation.” It doesn’t inspire engagement with other metaphors, like considering software to be a tree that must be grown incrementally and as a product of dynamic forces. It doesn’t map knowledge from the building domain to knowledge in the software domain.
Or that, with software, you can always rip out the foundation and replace it. And you're working on it as you work on the rest of the "building" anyway.
The difficulty of working on lower abstraction layers doesn't scale with the amount of higher layers. Unlike with buildings or bridges, there's no gravity in software, no loads and stresses that need to be collected and routed through foundations and into the ground, or balanced out at the core. In software, you can just redo the foundation, and usually it only affects things immediately connected to it.
A set of analogies for software that are better than civil engineering:
- Assembling puzzles.
- Painting.
- Working on a car that's been cut in half through the middle along its symmetry plane.
- Working on buildings and bridges as a Matrix Lord who lives in the 4th dimension.
All these examples share a crucial characteristic also shared by software: your view into it and construction work is being done in a dimension orthogonal to the dimension along which the artifact does its work. You can see and access (and modify, and replace) any part of it at any time.
The real "foundations" of a software system are probably its data structures rather than the infrastructure/backend. It's still an iffy metaphor though for the reasons you've given.
I love this insight, I just recently learned about the hidden HN feature to favorite comments and used it for the first time to favorite your comment. It's always a pleasure to read your comments on HN, I noticed your handle popping up here and there and would like to thank you for your contributions. If you had a collection of all your comments on HN printed in a book I think I would buy it:)
It's interesting to contrast this kind of organizational behavior with the type where "management won't give us time to deal with technical debt". Though arguably using an over-complicated framework is creating more technical debt, on a certain perspective, this is on the other end of this scale.
It seems to me what we want is some kind of "Platonic ideal" where the extremes are bad for development:
Management won't give us time to deal with technical debt/incorporate best practices.
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THE IDEAL
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Management wants the Hot New Thing all the time. uservices are the state-of-the-art in best practices so uservices it is!
The best advice (IMO) in dealing with the top end of this spectrum is to frame technical debt and best practices in terms of whatever economic metric the manager cares about (e.g., "TDD will lead to less bugs, ergo happier customers, ergo greater retention"). But I wonder if the same framing can be used to encourage temperance in managers who dwell on the bottom of my spectrum.
I somehow suspect it won't work. The problem with those at the top is that they see the dev's proposition as an investment that will either not bear fruit or, worse, slow the team down; so they are incentivized to keep status quo. Those at the bottom, however, start from a perspective that their idea will add value to the team so they keep pushing for it no matter what. And telling them "Let's not do what Google does; we're not Google" is definitely seen as a devaluation of the team.
This has been a weird headspace to explore. I'd love to hear from others' experience on dealing with this.
IMHO the problem is that with reusing your scale I typically see:
Management that don't really understand tech and is afraid to try things
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THE IDEAL
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Management that don't really understand business (and sometimes tech too) and is focused on tech fashion
Surprise the ideal is hard because it requires both tech and business experience to recognize how best practices and new tech could bring value in a specific context. The job is to make clients happy by solving their problems, with apps that are nice to use, bug free, performant, maintainable, evolvable, with a usually short time to market and obviously for the best cost. Sometimes that equation is solved with a complex stack, architecture and practices with hundreds of engineers, and sometimes with a few web pages, inlined CSS, a bit of vanilla JS, and a solo dev.
Honestly when they come with decisions like that, I'd like them to spend some time on a formal writeup - have them prove they understand the problem, the existing solution, the issues with it, and why React or technology X would solve it. Have them explain why they / their employer should spend thousands on changing it.
I mean it'll only take them an hour or two to write it up, better to spend that than the 20 hours it would take you (for example) to spin up a new stack.
Biggest problem with templating libraries like mustache is they aren’t context aware, so it is up to the programmer to remember the proper way to escape based on where a variable is used.
React isn't so bad. It's fairly straightforward and the components are contained within the page. And it's more of a library than a framework. The core is small and easy to learn
Angular is a giant confusing pile of magic. It's so complex you've gotta be a core developer to even understand how an app comes together. Stay the hell away if you can
I don't think it's developers tbh. Or rather, it's another set of perverse incentives in the industry.
To get a job, devs need experience in relevant tech. No company is willing to train their devs - they all have to hit the ground running. So devs have to have demonstrable experience in the tech that lots of companies use. Companies need to hire devs, and don't really care what tech is used. But using what everyone else uses makes their hiring easier because it's easier to find devs who want to work on that tech. So they advertise for devs with experience in a hot tech. The devs see this and try and move their internal projects to use the hot tech so that if/when they look for their next job they'll have experirence in it.
The devs are just trying to stay relevant in a rapidly changing tech scene so they can get their next job.
The companies who employ them don't care what tech is used, but find recruiting devs to be easier if they're working in the latest hot tech.
The key point that could change all this is if companies were willing to train their devs in the tech stack they're using.
The hydrogen client for matrix.org (1) has an interesting approach using vanilla JavaScript and indexeddb.
From a previous this week in matrix(2): "Hydrogen tries to be the lightest Element. It is written entirely in vanilla javascript (no React, no Webpack) for complete control, structured as an MVVM app, leveraging the raw performance of indexeddb."
One entry in this space that doesn't get a lot of attention is ASP.NET Blazor [1]. Blazor gives you the option of writing views in C# that will actually compile to WebAssembly and run in the browser, or run on the server and send DOM updates over a SignalR connection, a lot like LiveView.
And best of all, both Server and WebAssembly has a lot in common, so it is possible to make that movment as needed. (I often prototype in server, as it's a lot easier to debug, too!)
If you are using Blazor Server, you don't have to even think about REST APIs. Depending on your app, that might be good or bad. But if you primarily target browsers on Desktop, you can tremendously improve productivity, because you can directly use C# POCO Models for UI and backend data services.
Blazor is certainly a very interesting and promising piece of technology. However, Blazor Server hosting mode is prone to latency issues and requires always-on connection to run an applications (so, no offline mode). On the other hand, the alternative Blazor WebAssembly mode requires clients to download a sizeable mix of .NET runtime and other system DLLs on the first use of the application (even a lightweight demo application with almost zero app-specific resources requires a download of 6+ MB of data in DEBUG mode and 2+ MB in RELEASE mode). Of course, relevant Microsoft teams work hard on further minimizing the size of the system bundle, but there are obvious limits to efforts in this regard.
Is offline mode widely used? I remember it being released to great excitement and then I never heard about it again. I assumed it died out when being offline became too much of an edge-case for your average user to be worth dealing with.
It doesn't seem like there's any major difference so it's interesting that latency is perceived as being a reason not to use blazor server in production but not as such with liveview.
The audience for Blazor Server is probably an order of magnitude larger than the audience for LiveView, and it's mostly not the Hacker News crowd that needs to be won over, but the large enterprise with half a million lines of Web Forms that has grown into an unmaintainable behemoth.
Remember, that 2+ MB is the download size of a bare-bones application. Relevant sizes for real-world applications, obviously, would be bigger (though, depending on the total size, the Blazor part might or might not be essential).
Download sizes are definitely a problem but they’re not really a Blazor-specific issue these days. Also I would be curious to learn about the relative density of JavaScript bloat vs Blazor download sizes because the .NET class library is much more feature rich before adding dependencies and I could imagine bundle sizes actually being smaller for similar functionality above a certain point. But you’re right that it’s probably never going to get as small as a pure HTML + CSS app with progressive enhancement and minimal JavaScript.
I think that "under 1 MB" represents the size of .NET runtime proper. However, additional required system DLLs increase the download size of a minimal application to the numbers I cited above [1]. Anyway, your example of Amazon's front page is interesting and is a good point (even though, in my quick test out of curiosity, relevant download size resulted in 2.2 MB [not authenticated] and 9.2 MB [authenticated] - quite a bit less, but still ...).
Admittedly I don't have a lot of experience with enterprise web development in Java but I love working with ASP.NET Core and I think it's come a long way since the mess of Web Forms and classic ASP.
it smokes Spring in benchmarks, often by a factor of 10x or more, and on plaintext it's 50x faster than spring and even with the fastest Rust/C++ frameworks, so must be some awfully light baggage
It's not. You can literally have a simple "hello world" app in a handful of lines or code if you want.
I have to wonder if you actually use ASP.NET Core yourself, because ASP.NET Core 3 is, IMO, fantastic. ASP.NET used to be a bit clunky, and lacking in extensibility points, and a lot of people used alternatives like Nancy instead. Nancy officially stopped development around a year back, largely because dotnet devs just don't need it anymore. I was a long-time Nancy fan myself, ASP.NET Core 3 has all the best bits and more.
And you don't need to stick with the typical paradigm on controllers in one folder, views in another etc - feature folders work great. Hell, you don't even really need to use controllers, if Razor Pages are your thing.
Yup. Been using it for a very complex data app. Its awesome.
You can choose Wasm for LOB apps or on fast connections.
You can choose Server hosting for apps that have about 100,000 users at a time. Mind you, that is 100,000 users concurrently. Which should be more than enough for most apps.
There are plans to reduce bundle size and server side resources, coming in .NET 5.
As per Microsoft Benchmarks[1], it should cost about 100 USD per month (3 years, reserved instances, paid upfront) to handle 20,000 concurrent users. (This price is not including database, storage, etc). That comes to about 0.18 USD per user, for 3 years. (cost of serving app to 1 user for 3 years in total). Which seems pretty reasonable, especially if you have a decent, paid app. The cost comes down even more, if only a %age of your users are online concurrently.
On Digital Ocean, a similar machine, would cost about 40 USD a month. For 3 years, total cost for 1 users will be 0.072 USD
I guess it's still targeting the client-side SPA case, but I think Svelte[0] is worth a shoutout for taking a different approach than React/Vue/Angular/etc. The Svelte "framework" is really just a compiler that produces a small bundle of vanilla JS that updates the DOM directly (no virtual DOM).
I've had great success with the Turbolinks + Stimulus approach. There are a couple of common patterns that you'll reach for, namely, lazy loading content (basically a <div> with a URL attribute that you have Stimulus load via AJAX) and really leaning into Rails remote-link / server javascript responses for modals and little page updates.
It's so great to still be super productive and be able to crank out several pages of an app in a few hours vs most of the React / SPA codebases where you might send the whole day on one little component.
curious how you would implement refresh of a single row in a table after a job has completed? have enjoyed this combination too, but I feel like you'd have to subscribe to multiple ActionCable channels to do this?
StimulusReflex can do something like this quite easily. It re-renders the entire page (suggesting that you do a lot of fragment caching so this is fast) and then diffs it on client side with morphdom (IRC). I believe you can do partial rendering now, but I haven't tried it.
I am using the combination too. You really get a very near SPA feeling with a lot less effort.
BUT basecamp libraries (turbolinks, stimulus) are horrible open source libraries. There are not any changes or bug fixes for months now (for both) and nobody does know whats the actual state, whether they are abandoned or basecamp is working on something new. Then hey.com released and people found new features in both frameworks, so one day they will release (again) completely reworked versions of these libraries they have been working on in their private repositories.
Both libraries are really good together, but they would be better if developed more open by the community. They are basically abandonware the day they are released, until one day a complete rewrite and major version bump is released.
This is my go-to as well, and it really has worked out quite well for me. Everything feels super responsive and I find it very easy to create reusable stimulus controllers.
I come from the "js sprinkles" approach that rails has always favored, and this feels like a logical next iteration. I sometimes wonder why Basecamp doesn't publicize Stimulus a bit more; I really only learned about it at rails conf. It feels almost like it could be a part of rails itself, and it's the kind of thing that is useful for almost any full stack rails app that does server side rendering.
I've been building a site with Svelte/Apollo/Hasura. It's been pretty amazing so far. I think if you can get away with not needing SEO it's hard to beat.
That said, something that requires a lot of thought is not just constantly displaying spinners. When I look at projects built by experienced FEs it seems like there's a lot of patterns to work around this that I'm not aware of.
> That said, something that requires a lot of thought is not just constantly displaying spinners. When I look at projects built by experienced FEs it seems like there's a lot of patterns to work around this that I'm not aware of
I'm not sure what patterns you're thinking of. To me this just sounds like implementing caching and background fetching.
Yeah, it's mostly that--generally also some design stuff to hide it. It's just so tedious, or you can buy into a big framework with all the downsides that implies (big bundle size or a lot of tooling for code splitting).
That's where I see a lot of potential. With Stimulus Reflex I have the convenience and development speed of Rails and I can enhance it with StimulusJS sprinkles and reflexes to create great experiences for the user. The interactivity I get is enough for 90%+ of the webapps out there and the complexity to do it is far less.
Me too! As a developer mostly with desktop software development experiences, htmx is so much straightforward to understand and easy to code, it's a perfect chose for me to implement pages such as 'License Upgrade', 'License Renew', and so on: https://docxmanager.com/miscpages/upgrade-to-standard-from-b...
Do you have any examples or favorite articles about using it? I'm exploring the space, but have really limited time to sit down with all of the different options today. HTMX is one that is very intriguing.
How do you handle things like menu pop-ups and toggling/hiding content? I keep wanting to use htmx and it's like, but there always seem to be very common tasks like having an expandable menu on mobile that don't have a great solution in these libraries and I have to write vanilla JS.
I've settled on Alpine instead for the time being because it has some data management built in. I'm thinking I'm going to have to switch to Vue on my current project because I feel so much less productive with Alpine.
htmx is focused on increasing the network-oriented expressiveness of HTML, rather than on pure front end enhancements.
For something like menu popups or toggling content on the front end, I would expect an application to use a front end framework like bootstrap, or perhaps WebComponents, or a scripting solution like Alpine, in conjunction with htmx.
Alpine and htmx complement one another nicely, particularly since htmx 0.2.0, when we started firing kebab-style event names.
Basically, you can toggle visibility on your pop up menus or modals with standard CSS/HTML. The visibility class/attribute can be controlled declaratively or imperatively without much JS. You can even use CSS transitions to add nice smooth animation to your menu/overlay.
I think there is another layer to that conversation. Frameworks become bureaucratic and boring because they are developed by large teams for large teams. Most developers are working on small projects and need more fun and less maintaining huge amount of boilerplate code that recreates the browser.
The framework that I feel makes development less ugly is svelte. But still, I really don't like the idea of heavy client side websites. It really makes everything more complicated and the user's device slower.
I love the simplicity of Turbolinks,
I love how clean svelte code is and
I am trying to figure out the "glue"
I agree with you. I did give a look at Inertiajs just because Laravel was friendly towards it. Looks sweet.
Right now the "glue" I came up with is a silly connection between the server side router and the "Entry" component of Svelte. It works, it's 10 lines of code, it's clean and the website is super fast. But, both Inertia and my solution feel somehow "hackish". Not a proper pattern.
But really, anything to avoid client side routing, state management and auto-magic code splitting.
Wow, InertiaJS looks like exactly what I've been wishing for. Component-driven SFCs in Vue are the best tool I've used for interfaces in 20+ years, but I don't love having an API layer between the client and server. This is really interesting. Do you have experience with it and know how it handles frequently live-updating pages?
The only weak point for Svelte is there is no inline template composition (yet; already has a rfc). Anything that doesn't look like function is weak compossibility. Imagine recursively calling template itself with a bunch of condition logics, each branch renders different nested templates, and each of those calling its own ancestor root. Svelte is a joke to this thing.
Micro front-ends and packaged business capabilities. Build encapsulated domains (views, events, apis, data store) with their own dependencies (not shared with umbrella app) and pluggable with meta data.
You're not the only one. Sounds a lot like a former CTO of mine who couldn't write a line of code to save his life, but made sure to randomly toss out buzzwords and make sure you were aware of what he recently read in what I assume was an edition of Programming for Dummies.
My company talked about using micro front ends for a while. basically there was one microservice that actually served the web page itself and all of the controls and widgets on the web page were pulled from other microservices via API calls that each handled their own internal state.
Micro front-ends is the concept of breaking apart a front-end monolith. SPA's are usually built in one framework like Angular or React. Over time, this can get very convoluted and turn into a bad monolith (there are good ones).
The second part is that instead of building screens, you design features (like invoices or customers or catalog) and develop the set of views that encapsulate the targeted domain. This is all built in a separate project with a well-defined set of meta data. You deploy the feature-set into your integrated environment and the managing app is constantly on the lookout for new features-sets.
Then in some admin portion of your umbrella app, you provide access to API's to other feature-sets, and to users.
One of the key elements is to keep front-end dependencies separate. So the manager app might be Angular 9, the customer feature-set might be in Angular 10 with its own dependencies. Nothing is shared between the manager app and each feature-set and nothing is shared between feature-sets.
This provides a front-end that is malleable and reduces dependency creep.
This can also benefit from Domain-Driven Design, where you've segregated your domains and their API's, Events, and Data Storage.
So you should be able to "publish" a feature-set without any dependency on a central database, API mesh, or Event manager.
The key is to define your boundaries well and that is no small thing.
Based on this comment you do kind of sound like one. Could you elaborate on what you think 'Domain Driven Design' is, and what you think 'boundaries' are in the context of development? It would help dispel the impression I get that you're a clueless CTO who knows enough to be dangerous.
(apologies for being a bit rude perhaps; consider it a comment slightly in bad faith, but very curious to hear you prove me wrong)
DDD is a set of principles where you have conversations with your business partners, model scenarios, determine a ubiquitous language, and build software that mirrors those models and conversations. Determining your bound-contexts, their relationship to other bound-contexts, and determining where sub-domains belong. Though this can be confusing since you could have an "order" domain in several bound-contexts with different purposes. It also tends to move away from traditional OO modeling since we're pulling things apart, not abstracting them in order to decouple. I took Eric Evans 5-day class two years ago, but I've been professionally utilizing DDD for about five years including helping build Accenture's new performance management system.
I think the problem is your didn't concretely explain what your method entails and how it is any different from doing a plain HTML website or a Javascript one. Technically, there is a server, and a client, so what do you do exactly on the server and the client and how does it difference from other methods?
It's like someone asking you how does AJAX works and your start discussing functional programming. It doesn't explain what AJAX is and how does it differ from plain server side rendering.
Thanks for the in-good-faith response! I'd say that covers DDD pretty well.
I do still feel that the link between that and your suggestions in the initial comment are still tenuous and vague 'management-speak', but still, thanks for the response :). Obviously I don't know the exact details or how you're running things, so the best I can do is poke at it (in good faith).
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 336 ms ] threadIf a client tells me what they want built, I bet I'd be able to roughly guess how much js there's going to be, probably within a few hundred lines for a, say, 3 month project.
The larger the project, the large the margin of error, but still, it's really not that hard for the vast majority of work we do. Or at least I do, e-commerce, enterprise apps, etc.
https://qbix.com/blog/2020/01/02/the-case-for-building-clien...
E: Actually it might just be a really heavy page. It’s a disaster on mobile.
E2: After a few refreshes, it seems to be loading normally.
Too much JS being executed on every page.
It can do client side rendering, server side rendering, and static site genration.
I know the other frameworks and to me they all seem to have given up and go back to SSR.
I'm much more interested in what's coming from the Snowpack/Skypack direction.
This course is a pretty great intro: https://pragmaticstudio.com/phoenix-liveview
There are so many tradeoffs present that happen to result in the necessary set of functionality to do this efficiently that aren’t easily present outside of the BEAM.
With BEAM, robustness is a special feature. In the BEAM you can kill, restart and replace processes all over the place and everything stays working pretty well, because its structure means everything written for it is designed with that in mind.
In a typical async/await server side application sharing state across clients, killing, restarting and replacing usually means the whole single process containing all the async/await coroutines, and the fancy per-client state you were maintaining is lost.
You can of course serialise state, as well as coordinating it among multiple processes, but that takes more effort than just using async/await in a web app, and often people don't bother. Doing that right can get tricky and it requires more testing for something that doesn't happen often compared with normal requests. So instead, they let the occasional client session see a glitch or need reloading, and deem that no big deal.
At a high level, is the combination of process isolation, memory isolation, template delivery, websocket capability and resilience on top of all the standard web bits.
It will be really difficult to pull off with a good developer experience and minus several deficiencies outside of the BEAM. Anything’s possible though.
That said, if you want a different approach then check out my series at https://alchemist.camp/tagged/Reactor
I covered the whole process of building the site for my podcast https://reactor.am in the series.
Note that LiveView still isn't at v1.0 and breaking updates have been common. You'll have a much better with my LV tutorial or anyone else's if you use the exact same library versions we do and upgrade at the same point the tutorial does.
For things where you generally need a trip to the server anyway, like validations, it's great.
Maybe if you ran the server portion of PLV in the browser...but then you’re just back at React anyway I suppose.
One interesting thing is that it makes you consider memory issues again since all your rendered data structures are held in memory in the LiveView process unless they are explicitly cleared after the render with "temporary_assigns". For apps that would have to hold and transfer a lot of data up and down the channel I've ended up using a hybrid of LiveView with divs set to phx-update="ignore" in which I mount React components.
In practice, I've usually found that the advantages outweigh the disadvantages when it comes to the former. Beefing up my servers seems like a worthwhile trade-off.
When it comes to latency, or related issues, I find that I'm still so much better off using LV as a basis and 'dropping down' into plain JS or (p)react when I need it.
We recently delivered a project that involved a whole bunch of stuff that LV was a perfect solution for, but also a core bit of functionality that required various kinds of animations. We ended up using LV wherever we could, and piggy-backed on the LV channel (websockets) to handle synchronizing the animation stuff. The actual code to animate things was just plain old JS. Worked like a charm!
Typically you wouldn't use LV to handle:
Menu dropdowns, tooltips, popovers, modals (in some cases), tabs (when you don't want to load the content from the server) or things that change the client side state of something but don't adjust server state. That could be things like a "select all" checkbox toggle where that doesn't do anything on its own other than select or de-select client side check boxes or toggling the visibility of something. There's also things like wanting to copy to the clipboard or initiating stuff to happen on drag / drop (like animations).
Basically you'll still find yourself wanting to use JS with LV. Whether that's Stimulus, Alpine, Vue, jQuery, vanilla JS or something else that's up to you. But I do find most of the above necessary in a lot of web apps I develop.
> Typically you wouldn't use LV to handle:
> Menu drop dropdowns, tooltips, popovers, modals (in some cases), tabs (when you don't want to load the content from the server) or things that change the client side state of something but don't adjust server state.
My experience is that LiveView is fine for all but the last use case. And while in practice I often don't really need to keep things client-side-only, when I do it's often pretty easy to just write a bit of js and, if necessary, use hooks and events to communicate with the surrounding LiveView(s).
In fact, I vaguely recall that in the early days of LV, the creator himself argued that it should be used for just 'smaller interactive stuff'. Over time, we all discovered that LV does surprisingly well for SPA-type use cases (and as a result we now have stuff like router-level LiveViews (that take over the whole page), live_redirects, url updating, and so on).
> That could be things like a "select all" checkbox toggle where that doesn't do anything on its own other than select or de-select client side check boxes.
Why wouldn't you just keep that within the server-side state LV paradigm? I've done just that in a project I'm working on.
> There's also things like wanting to copy to the clipboard or initiating stuff to happen on drag / drop (like animations).
For those things you write js, yes.
> Basically you'll still find yourself wanting to use JS with LV. Whether that's Stimulus, Alpine, jQuery, vanilla JS or something else that's up to you. But I do find most of the above necessary in a lot of web apps I develop.
Absolutely, but I'm continuously surprised how little of it I need, and how often I /think/ I do just because I haven't quite wrapped my head around the different paradigm.
I wouldn't want to impose a 50-500ms+ delay on someone to show a menu drop down or a tooltip or most of the other things listed out.
With LV everything involves a server round trip. That's great for when you need to make a round trip no matter what (which is often the case, such as updating your database based on a user interaction), but it creates for very unnaturally sluggish feeling UIs when you use LV for things that you expect to be instant.
Even a 100ms delay on a menu feels off and with a good internet connection if you have a server in NY, you'll get 80-100ms ping times to the west coast of the US or the west coast of Europe.
LV feels amazing on localhost but the internet is global. I still think it's worth minimizing round trips to the server when you can, not because Phoenix and LV can't handle it but because I want my users to have a good experience using the sites I develop.
It's basically a UX standard that a tooltip only shows up after a few seconds, so that strikes me as a particularly bad example. That said, sure, if instant tooltips are important, a tiny bit of js and a specific class name in your markup would solve it.
> With LV everything involves a server round trip. That's great for when you need to make a round trip no matter what (which is often the case, such as updating your database based on a user interaction), but it creates for very unnaturally sluggish feeling UIs when you use LV for things that you expect to be instant.
Yeah, I do agree on that. While I feel using a tooltip is a bad example, in practice I wouldn't implement tooltips or menus in LiveView. Those would just be solved via some CSS trick or some plain old JavaScript.
> LV feels amazing on localhost but the internet is global. I still think it's worth minimizing round trips to the server when you can, not because Phoenix and LV can't handle it but because I want my users to have a good experience using the sites I develop.
I'll give you that generally I wouldn't use LV for tooltips and popups. But in part because those are really easy to solve without it.
But for /so/ much of the stuff involved in a SPA the latency has not been a problem in practice.
Consider tabbed content. Sure, I could make it all 'instant' by preloading the various bits of content and writing js to switch between these bits. But I can avoid that entirely by preloading those bits in my templates and using LV to switch/update classes. The tiny latency downside is worth the upsides: being able to update the content in those tabs live with no extra code (no API calls, no client-side frameworks, and server-side rendered as a nice bonus!).
My general approach is that I use LV as a default, and then use the 'Hook' system and some custom JS when latency is a concern. In practice that doesn't amount to much. So it's not a silver bullet, but it simplifies so much of what a typical SPA does.
But in the bigger picture, the advantages of this approach are huge:
1. no need to maintain state, routing, and so on on the front- and backend, which removes a huge source of complexity. It's all in one place. And if something in the DB is updated, it's trivial to make it live-update the client state. And because of websockets, such an update is almost instant.
2. being able to use the same language (and templating) on server and client (for the most part).
3. the ability to just use regular function calls to retrieve data, and selectively display what you want by using it in templates. No need to set up endpoints for the client, and no need to worry that perhaps accidentally the endpoint might send data down the wire that shouldn't be there (and that you might not notice because the JSX doesn't display it). I think in just the past year I've read about a number of serious data leaks that were basically a result of this.
4. no need (or not as much need) to keep an eye on the js payload. Want to format dates in particular way? Just add the dependency and use it however you like. It's only diff in the output that gets sent to the client!
5. little to no need to deal with a complicated build process.
6. server-side rendering out of the box, and in a simple manner!
7. less taxing on the client. No need for processing templates and a lot of code. Of course, the downside is that the server has to do more work.
Now obviously latency can be a downside, as is (potentially) increased memory and processor usage on the server. It's not a magic solution to everything :). Hell, my last project still needed quite a bit of javascript for some heavy interactivity where latency had to be avoided. But it's still astounding to me how many projects have become drastically simpler with the LiveView-approach!
Next.js gives you a great toolbag to choose from for each challenge, it's definitely going to stay around and keep growing like crazy.
JAMStack is Next.js with SSG+CSR.
1. Manually marking a component for hydration likely means shipping the whole structure below as JS, which may hit diminishing returns fairly quickly.
2. At least if you’re using TypeScript, enough is known (or could/should be) to determine which components are truly static. Next.js already has a rudimentary version of this. That kind of analysis could be a huge DX improvement.
JAM has other problems. I don't think that's one.
Almost never had a problem with HN either
And yet, it still uses 130 flipping megabytes of RAM, more than Youtube does, as well as more CPU than Youtube does at idle, as well as requiring several seconds to "start up" when first opening a tab. Ridiculous.
Because like other commenters that chimed in, I can notice most SPAs, and all SPAs I've used had annoying performance problems. By problems I don't mean a sudden request that takes half a second, but that every UI interaction feels subtly slow.
I don't know where people get these performance targets of "below 100ms and users won't notice". I notice. I notice if UI responses take longer than two-three animation frames, the same way I notice when a game is running at 20 FPS and not 60 FPS.
But totally agree with your position on this in general!
SPAs can start off with the good intention of being low-latency and responsive. But when you're backed by a web server, you still have to account for it though optimistic rendering, prefetching, and loading states. Getting it right can be an excellent UX, but it's easy to get very wrong.
If a non-SPA page loads near instantaneously because the client-side rendering isn't bloated, it can feel just as good as an SPA with spinners.
You can also use tools like turbolinks the author recommended, to turn your non-SPA into an SPA.
Depends.
Pressing a key and not seeing a character in less than 50-100ms, yeah, it's quite frustrating.
Clicking on a link and waiting for the content to load? Not so much.
Yes, but you often pay a huge penalty on the first page load, which for many use cases is the most important. I'd be so happy with a turbolinks version of GMail.
I wonder how many of the people crapping on SPAs are actual front-end or full-stack app devs, or otherwise people developing very close to the UX.
I'm sure there are some disgruntled UX devs who are running back to SSR, but when I come to the bimonthly "SPA sucks" thread on HN, for the most part it feels to me as though the critiques are coming from people for whom UX and front-end development are secondary concerns.
This is an interesting perspective. To me, SPAs blur the line between what's happening locally and server-side, so my impatience with slow functions on an SPA page is much greater than the same thing happening on a SSR page. Maybe it's just my conditioning to expect things on a single page to work much quicker as opposed to moving between pages.
IMO, well-designed SPAs should make use of the context-switching function of a complete page fetch in situations where the user might need to wait a relatively longer time for something to load instead of loading bars/spinners.
It's incredibly wasteful to do a SPA for one autocomplete field, or one map widget, etc. HTML delivered directly to the browser is very responsive.
nothing to do with the SPA of course
Going back requires holding down the back button so I can skip that history record. Illustrated: https://imgur.com/a/zFaGw4a
(Quite a few sites screw this up. It's very annoying.)
(Maybe you're logged in and don't get the behavior because of that?)
- tried to add a recipe and nothing happened for so long (3-5 seconds) that I thought it was broken. Then suddenly the add recipe form finally appeared. Blazing fast! On your dev laptop maybe.
- click payee, nothing happens. URL changes though. God I hate SPAs
- adding an item to your shopping list causes a 'item added' popup to appear. Over the add item button so you can't add another item without dismissing the popup. It's probably only an issue on mobilr, but this popup is only necessary because it's a SPA
- I'm on the 'create shopping category page'. Try and click the 3 dot thing in the top right. The new menu appears underneath the body of the page...
- on the recipe page, you can click the M? button and it displays a link about 'markdown'. Click the link, it takes you to a blank page, which then redirects back to the homepage after a second or two. Bye-bye all your existing input
- this is more of a bug, but if you try and use markdown in the directions text box for recipes, you can't. Start with a # and all your input just disappears (Firefox mobile)
A few other comments I'd add:
- Get a designer, or maybe buy an off the shelf design. That green is err, not nice. The design looks like a developer made it. I'm not great either but you can get a decent design, based on bootstrap or whatever, for like $50 and just adapt it. There are even free designsz like AdminLTE
- why are the top corners of the input boxes rounded, but the bottom corners square?
- Every time I go to the login screen, the logo pops in later than the rest of the screen. And then the Google login pops in even later. I'm on my mobile so can't check, but that screams bad browser cache settings on your images/static assets
- why are the + buttons slightly elliptical instead of round? Looks odd
I generally like the idea behind the app though, though won't use it as it's all in $s. I wonder how much traction you're going to get though as it's going to be really intensive setting it all up
Was your comment just an attempt at some growth hacking?
For most apps in Phoenix LiveView, it's probably best to think of this as a "relatively smart caching layer". Keeping state on the client invokes distributed state concens anyways, and in the case of the Phoenix, at least the VM is well-equipped with the relevant primitives to make distributed state easy, especially. Basically the only cost you have to pay is if latency is a big deal, you are making a trip back and forth to the server, which could be 100s of milliseconds or more in bad situations... Or even really bad situations, like driving under a tunnel, or being in some stretches of subway.
I'm convinced that this is the solution for the majority of use-cases, combined with selective usage of either React components or something like Stimulus where you need more sophisticated UI components.
[1] https://inertiajs.com/
https://unpoly.com/
AFAIK, the problem was that vendors couldn't agree on which version of SQL/Sqlite they would have to support and nobody wanted to write a SQL spec. MS wanted to use SQL Compact, but it's mainly Mozilla's fault if the spec was dropped. The same Mozilla that dragged its feet for years when it comes to implementing some aspects of web components...
But it was a terrible decision IMHO because indexedDB doesn't do what a relational database does and it considerably hurt the development of complex mobile web apps, and now Safari on IOS AFAIK removed support for WebSQL. WebSQL was a fantastic tool for web apps that could be entirely cached on a mobile device (SQL can do a lot).
There is no realistic replacement. Even using Sqlite compiled to WASM has a lot of issues (mainly performances and data persistence).
To this day I don't know a single efficient and performance RDBMS equivalent to Sqlite built on top of IndexedDB. Mozilla certainly didn't build one.
Not many people know this, but a service worker (previously called "local server") allows you to run a little web server in the user's browser that intercepts requests to your own web site. (There's no open IP port.)
The service-worker web server can proxy requests to the remote server, and even build/store entire pages on the client side, enabling offline support. Service workers also have access to a local database, IndexedDB, running in the user's browser.
You can build a very fast web experience this way. You can easily cache individual pieces of a web page and glue them all together.
For example, you can easily implement server-side includes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Side_Includes or edge-side includes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edge_Side_Includes but running on a server that's running on the client.
(IMO they should still be called local servers, or server workers perhaps. Service worker is too vague)
I'm doing a bit of a rewrite right now so this flexibility will come soon.
https://github.com/jon49/MealPlanner
Right now it only works offline.
I miss meteor. It was such a great framework and promise. Not for big sites really, but for mock-ups, internal sites ect. A while ago I started to look at it again. The drivers behind the project was essentially asking for input on what was preventing people from using the framework. The current state of the project is/was OK, except for the fact that it was hold down by all the guides and howtos referring to previous versions. It was not well documented what current best practices to follow, what to use as replacements for deprecated dependencies ect.
Accidentally cache your index.js file? You are now stuck with your serviceworker forever (unless you do some chrome voodoo).
The promise is there, but it’s just a gigantic footgun.
Any issue with webworkers is almost by necessity opaque.
https://github.com/turbolinks/turbolinks#working-with-script...
When SPA's became the norm and even static web pages needed to be build with React, developing became more and more inefficient. I saw whole teams struggling to build simple applications and wasting months of time, while these used to be developed within a couple of weeks with just 1 or 2 developers, on proven server side opinioated frameworks. But that was no longer according to best practices and industry standards. Everything needed to be SPA, micro services, distributed databases, Kubernetes etc. These components and layers needed to be glued together by trial and error.
I am really happy that common sense is starting to return and more developers are starting to realize that integrated end to end frameworks are very useful for a lot of real life application development scenario's.
It sounds crazy to say that now but Angular became big because it was actually quite lightweight compared to other JS frameworks of this era, declarative 2 way databinding was cool, it was compatible with jQuery (thus its widget ecosystem) and it was also developed with testing in mind. So it was easy to move jQuery projects to Angular ones, and developers cared about this aspect and it helped organize code quite a bit. Angular 2 on the other hand never made sense and it was a solution looking for problem.
React and JSX came along and allowed developers to use JS classes when a lot of browsers didn't support them. And unidirectional dataflow was all at rage. It was always the right solution of course, but I never heard about DOM diffing before that which to me is the main appeal to React. To this date, HTML API still do not have a native(thus efficient) DOM diffing API which is a shame.
> When SPA's became the norm and even static web pages needed to be build with React, developing became more and more inefficient. I saw whole teams struggling to build simple applications and wasting months of time, while these used to be developed within a couple of weeks with just 1 or 2 developers, on proven server side opinionated frameworks. But that was no longer according to best practices and industry standards. Everything needed to be SPA, micro services, distributed databases, Kubernetes etc. These components and layers needed to be glued together by trial and error.
IMHO the problem isn't React and co or even SPA. In fact writing an REST/Web API should be easier than writing a server-side generated HTML website (no need for templating language, ugly form frameworks,...). The problem is the horrible and complex NodeJS/NPM backed asset compilation pipelines and build tools that these framework often require in a professional setting, which incur a lot of complexity for very little gain.
Why is that easier? It's more work, you are now rendering two views instead of one, a JSON one(server) and HTML one(in the client) with all the JSON encoding/decoding that it entails. You are still using a templating language and, dealing with forms in React is more cumbersome than doing it server-side.
nowadays once the json schema design is settled, they can work in parallel, each of them can test their parts without needing the other and the merges can be simpler, because the parts do work more or less stand-alone.
Nitpick, but I doubt that was the reason developers are flocking to React back then. In the beginning browsers didn't support JavaScript classes and neither did React. You fake them by using a function known as React.createClass instead. There was also no transpilation required, as JSX was optional. In fact React was always about unidirectional data flow, and reasoning about state -> DOM elements rather than reasoning about changes to the DOM.
Would like to hear more.
This is a major problem with our industry. Unfortunately, the people with the power to curb this trend have their paycheck depend on it continuing.
As a company, you are incentivised to have a large tech team to appear credible and raise funding, so you hire a CTO and maybe some engineering managers. Their career in turn benefits from managing large amounts of people and solving complex technical problems (even if self-inflicted), so they’ll hire 10x the amount of engineers the task at hands truly requires, organise them in separate teams and build an engineering playground that guarantees their employment and gives them talking points (for conferences or the seemingly-mandatory engineering blog or in interviews for their next role) about how they solve complex problems (self-inflicted, as a side-effect of an extremely complex stack with lots of moving parts). Developers themselves need to constantly keep up to date, so they won’t usually push back on having to use the latest frontend framework, and even if they do, that decision is out of their hands and they’ll just get replaced or not hired to begin with.
In the end, AWS and the cloud providers are laughing all the way to the bank to collect their (already generous) profits, now even more inflated by having their clients use 10x the amount of compute power that the business problem would normally require.
Maybe the issue is the seemingly-infinite amounts of money being invested into tech companies of dubious value, and the solution would be to get back to Earth as to have some financial pressure coming from up top that incentivises using the simplest solution to the problem at hand?
It just takes years and lots of room to do basically nothing, and if something meaningfully shifts, you need a while to get back up to speed.
I'm not saying it's efficient, or that you should dive in, but I did want to throw out there that there is a light at the end of the tunnel. People using React.js aren't flailing about in the dark the whole time.
If true, that's a damning indictment of the industry and the whole SPA pattern.
To be willing to not use an SPA, you need to be willing to exclude certain options from day 1. Find me a product manager willing to do that.
How many times has it actually happened that some scrappy startup has 1) became the next big thing and 2) not being at the edge of over-engineering actually killed it or significantly impacted its revenue? This just feels like wishful thinking.
Also keep in mind that even if you were on track to become the next Google Docs, this means your current product is usually good enough as-is and gives you time (and $$$) to improve it.
I agree with the rest of your point - the value of the product to end-users has little to no correlation with the underlying technology choices, which is a pretty controversial statement, but one that I think is true. A customer doesn't care if you built it in React, in one Perl file, or if you're sacrificing goats to retain the minimum requisite levels of dark magic to keep the system running. If it solves their problem they'll keep giving you money for goats.
IMO when the time comes and your product is used well, you may be ready financially and technically to do a complete rewrite. Otherwise maybe the current functioning application is better if the rewrite isn't justified.
I'd rather have their architecture than 100's of VMs.
For those who are discouraged by the massive complexity of Kubernetes/Terraform and various daunting system design examples of big sites, remember you can scale to a ridiculous levels (barring video or heavy processing apps) with just vertical scaling.
Before you need fancy Instagram scale frameworks, you’ll have other things to worry about like appearing in front of congress for a testimony :-)
I share the general HN sentiment over microservices complexity but just to play devil's advocate...
I suspect that server cost in this case is asymptotic. If the (monetary) cost of SE's architecture is F(n) and your typical K8s cluster is G(n), where n is number of users or requests per second, F(n) < G(n) only for very large values of n. As in very large.
In essence, the devil's advocate point I'm making is that maybe development converges towards microservices because cloud providers make this option cheaper than traditional servers. We would gladly stay with our monoliths otherwise.
I tried to contrive a usage scenario to illustrate this but you know the problem with hypotheticals. And without even a concrete problem domain to theorize on, I can't even ballpark estimate compute requirements. Would love to see someone else's analysis, if anyone can come up with one.
The main argument in favor of the 'cloud' is that it's easier to manage (and even that is often questioned).
https://read.acloud.guru/how-going-serverless-helped-us-redu...
https://techbeacon.com/enterprise-it/economics-serverless-co...
https://medium.com/perfsys-blog/how-serverless-computing-sav...
Microservices, as an architectural choice, are most properly chosen to manage complexity - product and organizational - almost by brute force, since you really have to work to violate abstraction boundaries when you only have some kind of RPC to work with. To the degree that they can improve performance, it's by removing confounding factors; one service won't slow down another by competing for limited CPU or database bandwidth if they've got their own stack. If you're paying attention, you'll notice that this is going to cost more, not less, because you're allocating excess capacity to prevent noisy neighbour effects.
Breaking up a monolith into parts which can scale independently can be done in a way that doesn't require a microservice architecture. For example, use some kind of sharding for the data layer (I'm a fan of Vitess), and two scaling groups, one for processing external API requests (your web server layer), and another for asynchronous background job processing (whether it's a job queue or workers pulling from a message queue or possibly both, depends on the type of app), with dynamic allocation of compute when load increases - this is something where k8s autoscale possibly combined with cluster autoscaling shines. This kind of split doesn't do much for product complexity, or giving different teams the ability to release parts of the product on their own schedule, use heterogeneous technology or have the flexibility to choose their own tech stack for their corner of the big picture, etc.
You say that serverless will cost more "to prevent noisy neighbor effects"...but that is an abstraction most cloud providers will already give you. Something you already pay your provider for. So my DA point now is, is it cheaper to pay them to handle this or is it cheaper to shell out your own and manage manually?
I actually wasn't talking about serverless at any point - I understand that term to mostly mean FaaS and don't map it to things like k8s without extra stuff on top, which is closer to where I'd position microservices - a service is a combo of data + compute, not a stateless serverless function. But I agree we're not quite talking about the same things. And unfortunately I don't care enough to figure out how to line it up. :)
Org factors rather than cloud compute costs are why you go microservice rather than monolith was my main point, I think.
A salary of 3 infra engineers per year $300k, cost to company probably $450k.
For $450k a year, you can get about 500 servers, each one with 128 GB RAM and 32 vCPUs.
Has anyone done this type of a ROI?
Unless high availability is the concern, I’d always recommend a big machine with lots of CPUs than lots of small ones.
Hell I might even run kube if I was running bare metal. Declarative workloads are amazing.
Anecdotally I find the opposite to be true. I've been writing frontend code for over a decade, but I've never moved faster and wrote less buggy code than now. Is that because I've become a better developer? Sure, a little bit. But by and large, I don't believe that ultimately is the reason. I think it's the maturity in the technology. My growth as a programmer is hardly linear and the past 5 years have not matched the growth I achieved in my first 5. Frontend tooling has never been better than it is today.
What I believe, is that the bar to build web applications has been lowered, and there are more programmers than today than ever before. You have people who are not experts in frontend development and javascript trying to build complex UIs and applications. So you take this person who doesn't have the requisite experience and put them to work on a paradigm with a lot of depth (frontend) using frameworks that are really simple and easy to get started with, but compound problems as they are misused.
Another factor is that since SPAs are stateful, complexity mounts aggressively. Instead of a refresh on a stateless page every few seconds, one page causes bugs that rear their head for the duration of the session. These inexperienced people are put in charge of designing codebases that don't scale and become spaghetti. But when designed properly, these problems are largely negated.
I'm not advocating that SPAs are the solution to all problems. I think there's gross overuse of SPAs across the industry, but that is not an indictment of SPAs themselves. That is someone choosing the wrong technology to solve the active problem.
With respect to angular (1, I never touched 2) specifically, I always found it extremely overengineered, poorly designed, with terrible APIs. But that's a problem with that specific framework and says nothing at all about SPAs at all.
What's the library or design pattern to consume a REST API in React or any of the mainstream front-end frameworks? The only thing I'm aware of is Ember Data but Ember is apparently not cool anymore, and I couldn't find a suitable replacement.
I'm asking because in all the projects I've been involved with, consuming the backend API always felt like a mess with lots of reinventing the wheel (poorly) and duplication of code. I can't believe in 2020 there's not some kind of library I can call that will give me my backend resources as JSON and transparently handle all the caching, pagination, error handling (translate error responses to exceptions), etc and people have to do all this by hand when calling something like Axios.
In contrast, Django REST Framework handles all that boilerplate for me and allows me to jump right into writing the business logic. It's insane that ~30 lines of code with DRF (https://www.django-rest-framework.org/#example) gives me a way to expose RESTful endpoints for a database model to the web with authentication, pagination, validation, filtering, etc in a reusable way (these are just Python classes after all) but the modern front-end doesn't have the client equivalent of this.
If you look at 20 REST API's you'll probably see 30 different patterns for pagination, search/sort, error responses, etc. There have been a couple attempts to standardize REST such as OData but I think it's safe to say that they haven't been very successful. It's kind of challenging to build standard reusable front end tools when everyone builds back ends differently.
You have the concept of data adapters which would be clients for your API (you can make a custom one if extending the existing ones isn't an option) and the rest of the application just interacts with the equivalent of database models without ever having to worry about fetching the data. You could swap the data adapter without having to change the rest of the code.
We seem to have lost this with the move to React though, and even the hodgepodge of libraries doesn't provide a comparable replacement.
My team generates backend stubs from our GRPC spec which allows us to jump right to implementing our business logic.
Frontend projects make use of the GRPC-Web client codegen to make calling the API simple and type safe (we use typescript).
We mostly use all the official GRPC tooling for this. We write backends in golang and dotnet core so GRPC-Web is supported quite well out of the box.
I wrote a slightly modified Typescript codegenerator to make client code simpler as well: https://github.com/Place1/protoc-gen-grpc-ts-web
There are, of course, other solutions besides GRPC.
For React, its out of scope; anything that you can use in JS for this can be used. If you are using a state management library, that's probably more relevant to your selection here than React is.
REST is also too open-ended for a complete low-friction solution, but, e.g., if its swagger/openapi, there's tools that will do almost the entire thing for you with little more than the spec.
> The only thing I'm aware of is Ember Data but Ember is apparently not cool anymore, and I couldn't find a suitable replacement.
Ember Data is definitely a valid choice. It may not be hyped right now, but that has little to do with utility or use in the real world.
I think this is one area where front end tooling can be painful for the average dev. The bar to writing idiomatic JS for a given framework can get pretty high quickly, especially when you look at some of the really popular tools out there (i.e. redux).
Front end work has become so much harder to grok because the patterns around things like state management still have a lot of warts. The terminology of redux drives me crazy because it’s really difficult to explain things like reducers.
Look at JS that's written for serious applications today, identify the stuff that you'd label as "idiomatic", and then look at code that was written 10 years ago for serious applications, and see if it matches what your conception of "idiomatic JS" is. Good references for the way JS was written for high-quality applications without the negative influence of the new idioms (because they didn't exist yet): the JS implementing Firefox and the JS implementing the Safari Web Inspector.
Examples of how "idiomatic JS" is often written by people who are working against the language instead of with it:
- insistence on overusing triple equals despite the problems that come with it
- similarly, the lengths people go to to treat null and undefined as if they're synonymous
- config parameter hacks and hacks to approximate multiple return values
- `require`, NodeJS modules, and every bundler (a la webpack) written, ever
- `let self = this` and all the effort people go through not to understand `this` in general (and on that note, not strictly pure JS, but notice how often the `self` hack is used for DOM event handlers because people refuse to understand the DOM EventListener interface)
- every time people end up with bloated GC graphs with thousands of unique objects, because they're creating bespoke methods tightly coupled via closure to the objects that they're meant for because lol what are prototypes
These "idioms" essentially all follow the same "maturation" period: 1. A problem is encountered by someone who doesn't have a solid foundation 2. They cross-check notes with other people in the same boat, and the problem is deemed to have occurred because of a problem in the language 3. A pattern is adopted that "solves" this "problem" 4. Now you have N problems
People think of this stuff as "idiomatic JS" because pretty much any package that ends up on NPM is written this way, since they're all created by people who were at the time trying to write code like someone else who was trying to write code like the NodeJS influencers who are considered heroes within that particular cultural bubble, so it ends up being monkey-see-monkey-do almost all the way down.
Can you recommend any sources of truth/books that can guide down the right path? Of course I'll be going through all the things you mention but I'm just curious if there's somewhere I can get the right information besides just reading through Firefox code, for example.
Thanks!!!
Basically, go for anything that teaches you non-js-specific approaches as well as as a solid understanding of the fundamentals.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algebraic_data_type
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/42833270/what-is-the-dif...
A redux reducer: The action and the current state reduce into the new state. And of course it doesn't matter how many reducers or combined reducers your state uses - they're all ultimately just doing this.
This also works for Array.prototype.reduce(). You're reducing two things into one.
I'm primarily a backend developer and I think in general backend developers makes for "poor fronted devs". I'm talking about those "occasional" times the backend-dev needs to do some f.e dev work. Just because they don't know the tech as well, best practises and spend as much time with it as a dedicated F.E Dev. jQuery code written by the "occasional front-end dev" is kinda horrific in many cases.
Now please internet hear me. I'm not saying you can't write bad code in a JS-Framework. I'm saying it's usually less often and less bad - especially for non-dedicated f.e devs
Like crossing a street, just looking left and right won't guarantee you to be safe in your crossing, but it damn near makes it less probable.
If you are a shop with mostly backend-devs and don't want to invest in a F.E dev, you definitely should look into a js-framework.
*Svelte is always good start very small and bare bones.
That matches in my experience.
I worked in a shop with only backend developers and the frontend was an absolute buggy mess of jQuery on top of bootstrap. After migrating most of it to Vue I taught it to the team and all the experienced-but-frontend-shy developers started producing great frontend code by themselves.
I second this
The barrier to entry is lower than for React, and the results are great
Yes, the bar to build web applications has been lowered. We can all build something on the level of GMail now.
The ability to build websites has been crippled, because you are often forced to build the sites using the tools suited to applications. As you and both the parent comment seem to agree on.
eh. Swing in its golden age run circle around what we have now. Granted it's old tech now that we settled for in-browser delivery, but still:
- look and feels could do theming you can only dream of with css variables/scss
- serialize and restore gui states partially or whole, including listeners
- value binding systems vue can only dream of
- native scrollers everywhere you could style and listen to without the rendered complaining about passive handlers. - layout that didn't threw a fit about forced reflows
- unhappy with the standard layouts? build your own one as needed
- debug everything, including the actual render call that put an image where it is
- works the same in all supported os
browsers are an insufferable environment to work within compared to that, css is powerful and all but you get a system you can only work by inference, and were everything interferes with everything else by default, which works great to style a document and is a tragedy in an app with many reusable nested components.
There are a few things I definitely miss from my 20 years as a Java dev, but the half assed and under funded Swing UI is not among them.
Give me HTML+CSS+JS any time.
but it's not like it was that worse than flex bugs ( https://codepen.io/sandrosc/pen/YWQAQO still does render differently in chrome than firefox - which one is wrong is immaterial)
Sure! And Chrome is superbly tested.
But HTML/CSS/JS aren't anywhere near good enough to build GUIs of any complexity by themselves, so everyone layers tons of stuff on top. And then those ... those, people have plenty of complaints about too. But if they didn't use them those complaints would migrate to the underlying framework.
I mean, Swing may have had a fragile threading model (not sure what you mean by that really), but HTML doesn't have one at all. Not great!
There are plenty of things wrong with HTML & friends, await/async and webpack being my personal hair removers, but if we set that aside and just talk about the DOM as the API for the UI, it’s very robust, well documented and widely available. I don’t love it, but it works.
We've been using the wrong tool for the job for over 2 decades. Now it's everywhere and nobody knows any better. It's probably too late now.
I'm in a weird situation where I'm contracting into one organisation and they've contracted me out to another. The first organisation know me as a senior dev/architect with 15 years experience in a niche domain. The second organisation see me as brand new to them and despite paying an embarrassing day rate are giving me noddy UI tweaks to do. Extracting myself is proving to be slow somehow.
Anyway, they wanted a webapp with a couple of APIs and nothing on the page than a button, the authenticated username and a line of text. Clicking the button opts you in/out of a service and the text changes depending on the state. The sort of thing people go to once, maybe twice.
I used a mustache template on the server side to populate the values and I didn't even bother with any javascript, just did an old school form submission to the API when the button was clicked and a redirect back to the page.
It was tiny but, obviously it was decided "we should be using a more modern framework" - code for React. It was the more word that got to me, as if there was an equivalent, dated framework I'd used. I didn't put up a fight partly because I was new to the team and figured they were hot on React and I wasn't. Somehow, they made a complete hash of it, they couldn't even figure out how to get all their inline styles (the only styles they used) working without help.
I guess it's just those classics; people want to learn the hot new thing as they see it, their managers are happy that they've heard a buzzword they recognise and then everything becomes a nail for their new hammer.
The difficulty of working on lower abstraction layers doesn't scale with the amount of higher layers. Unlike with buildings or bridges, there's no gravity in software, no loads and stresses that need to be collected and routed through foundations and into the ground, or balanced out at the core. In software, you can just redo the foundation, and usually it only affects things immediately connected to it.
A set of analogies for software that are better than civil engineering:
- Assembling puzzles.
- Painting.
- Working on a car that's been cut in half through the middle along its symmetry plane.
- Working on buildings and bridges as a Matrix Lord who lives in the 4th dimension.
All these examples share a crucial characteristic also shared by software: your view into it and construction work is being done in a dimension orthogonal to the dimension along which the artifact does its work. You can see and access (and modify, and replace) any part of it at any time.
It seems to me what we want is some kind of "Platonic ideal" where the extremes are bad for development:
The best advice (IMO) in dealing with the top end of this spectrum is to frame technical debt and best practices in terms of whatever economic metric the manager cares about (e.g., "TDD will lead to less bugs, ergo happier customers, ergo greater retention"). But I wonder if the same framing can be used to encourage temperance in managers who dwell on the bottom of my spectrum.I somehow suspect it won't work. The problem with those at the top is that they see the dev's proposition as an investment that will either not bear fruit or, worse, slow the team down; so they are incentivized to keep status quo. Those at the bottom, however, start from a perspective that their idea will add value to the team so they keep pushing for it no matter what. And telling them "Let's not do what Google does; we're not Google" is definitely seen as a devaluation of the team.
This has been a weird headspace to explore. I'd love to hear from others' experience on dealing with this.
I mean it'll only take them an hour or two to write it up, better to spend that than the 20 hours it would take you (for example) to spin up a new stack.
Angular is a giant confusing pile of magic. It's so complex you've gotta be a core developer to even understand how an app comes together. Stay the hell away if you can
To get a job, devs need experience in relevant tech. No company is willing to train their devs - they all have to hit the ground running. So devs have to have demonstrable experience in the tech that lots of companies use. Companies need to hire devs, and don't really care what tech is used. But using what everyone else uses makes their hiring easier because it's easier to find devs who want to work on that tech. So they advertise for devs with experience in a hot tech. The devs see this and try and move their internal projects to use the hot tech so that if/when they look for their next job they'll have experirence in it.
The devs are just trying to stay relevant in a rapidly changing tech scene so they can get their next job.
The companies who employ them don't care what tech is used, but find recruiting devs to be easier if they're working in the latest hot tech.
The key point that could change all this is if companies were willing to train their devs in the tech stack they're using.
From a previous this week in matrix(2): "Hydrogen tries to be the lightest Element. It is written entirely in vanilla javascript (no React, no Webpack) for complete control, structured as an MVVM app, leveraging the raw performance of indexeddb."
(1) https://github.com/vector-im/hydrogen-web (2)https://matrix.org/blog/2020/08/14/this-week-in-matrix-2020-...
[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/blazor/
At the same time, while not condoning it, I just scrolled to the bottom of Amazon's front page and downloaded over 30 MB.
[1] https://blog.ndepend.com/blazor-internals-you-need-to-know
I have to wonder if you actually use ASP.NET Core yourself, because ASP.NET Core 3 is, IMO, fantastic. ASP.NET used to be a bit clunky, and lacking in extensibility points, and a lot of people used alternatives like Nancy instead. Nancy officially stopped development around a year back, largely because dotnet devs just don't need it anymore. I was a long-time Nancy fan myself, ASP.NET Core 3 has all the best bits and more.
And you don't need to stick with the typical paradigm on controllers in one folder, views in another etc - feature folders work great. Hell, you don't even really need to use controllers, if Razor Pages are your thing.
You can choose Wasm for LOB apps or on fast connections.
You can choose Server hosting for apps that have about 100,000 users at a time. Mind you, that is 100,000 users concurrently. Which should be more than enough for most apps.
There are plans to reduce bundle size and server side resources, coming in .NET 5.
As per Microsoft Benchmarks[1], it should cost about 100 USD per month (3 years, reserved instances, paid upfront) to handle 20,000 concurrent users. (This price is not including database, storage, etc). That comes to about 0.18 USD per user, for 3 years. (cost of serving app to 1 user for 3 years in total). Which seems pretty reasonable, especially if you have a decent, paid app. The cost comes down even more, if only a %age of your users are online concurrently.
On Digital Ocean, a similar machine, would cost about 40 USD a month. For 3 years, total cost for 1 users will be 0.072 USD
[1] - https://devblogs.microsoft.com/aspnet/blazor-server-in-net-c...
[0] https://svelte.dev/
It's so great to still be super productive and be able to crank out several pages of an app in a few hours vs most of the React / SPA codebases where you might send the whole day on one little component.
BUT basecamp libraries (turbolinks, stimulus) are horrible open source libraries. There are not any changes or bug fixes for months now (for both) and nobody does know whats the actual state, whether they are abandoned or basecamp is working on something new. Then hey.com released and people found new features in both frameworks, so one day they will release (again) completely reworked versions of these libraries they have been working on in their private repositories.
Both libraries are really good together, but they would be better if developed more open by the community. They are basically abandonware the day they are released, until one day a complete rewrite and major version bump is released.
I come from the "js sprinkles" approach that rails has always favored, and this feels like a logical next iteration. I sometimes wonder why Basecamp doesn't publicize Stimulus a bit more; I really only learned about it at rails conf. It feels almost like it could be a part of rails itself, and it's the kind of thing that is useful for almost any full stack rails app that does server side rendering.
That said, something that requires a lot of thought is not just constantly displaying spinners. When I look at projects built by experienced FEs it seems like there's a lot of patterns to work around this that I'm not aware of.
I'm not sure what patterns you're thinking of. To me this just sounds like implementing caching and background fetching.
LiteDOM https://litedom.js.org/
Stimulus https://stimulusjs.org/
Turbolinks https://github.com/turbolinks/turbolinks
Laravel Livewire https://laravel-livewire.com/
Phoenix LiveView https://github.com/phoenixframework/phoenix_live_view
That's where I see a lot of potential. With Stimulus Reflex I have the convenience and development speed of Rails and I can enhance it with StimulusJS sprinkles and reflexes to create great experiences for the user. The interactivity I get is enough for 90%+ of the webapps out there and the complexity to do it is far less.
I've settled on Alpine instead for the time being because it has some data management built in. I'm thinking I'm going to have to switch to Vue on my current project because I feel so much less productive with Alpine.
For something like menu popups or toggling content on the front end, I would expect an application to use a front end framework like bootstrap, or perhaps WebComponents, or a scripting solution like Alpine, in conjunction with htmx.
Alpine and htmx complement one another nicely, particularly since htmx 0.2.0, when we started firing kebab-style event names.
That gives me hope as I’ve wanted to use htmx on a project. Gonna start playing around with it tonight. Thanks!
#UseThePlatform
The framework that I feel makes development less ugly is svelte. But still, I really don't like the idea of heavy client side websites. It really makes everything more complicated and the user's device slower.
I love the simplicity of Turbolinks, I love how clean svelte code is and I am trying to figure out the "glue"
• Write the glue code yourself if you only need svelte on a few pages • Inertiajs if you want to replace your view layer with svelte
Right now the "glue" I came up with is a silly connection between the server side router and the "Entry" component of Svelte. It works, it's 10 lines of code, it's clean and the website is super fast. But, both Inertia and my solution feel somehow "hackish". Not a proper pattern.
But really, anything to avoid client side routing, state management and auto-magic code splitting.
Micro front-ends is the concept of breaking apart a front-end monolith. SPA's are usually built in one framework like Angular or React. Over time, this can get very convoluted and turn into a bad monolith (there are good ones).
The second part is that instead of building screens, you design features (like invoices or customers or catalog) and develop the set of views that encapsulate the targeted domain. This is all built in a separate project with a well-defined set of meta data. You deploy the feature-set into your integrated environment and the managing app is constantly on the lookout for new features-sets.
Then in some admin portion of your umbrella app, you provide access to API's to other feature-sets, and to users.
One of the key elements is to keep front-end dependencies separate. So the manager app might be Angular 9, the customer feature-set might be in Angular 10 with its own dependencies. Nothing is shared between the manager app and each feature-set and nothing is shared between feature-sets.
This provides a front-end that is malleable and reduces dependency creep.
This can also benefit from Domain-Driven Design, where you've segregated your domains and their API's, Events, and Data Storage.
So you should be able to "publish" a feature-set without any dependency on a central database, API mesh, or Event manager.
The key is to define your boundaries well and that is no small thing.
Based on this comment you do kind of sound like one. Could you elaborate on what you think 'Domain Driven Design' is, and what you think 'boundaries' are in the context of development? It would help dispel the impression I get that you're a clueless CTO who knows enough to be dangerous.
(apologies for being a bit rude perhaps; consider it a comment slightly in bad faith, but very curious to hear you prove me wrong)
It's like someone asking you how does AJAX works and your start discussing functional programming. It doesn't explain what AJAX is and how does it differ from plain server side rendering.
I do still feel that the link between that and your suggestions in the initial comment are still tenuous and vague 'management-speak', but still, thanks for the response :). Obviously I don't know the exact details or how you're running things, so the best I can do is poke at it (in good faith).