Ask HN: What is the future of back-end development?

#1

Post by johnnydoebk » Fri, Aug 12, 2016, 8:43 AM UTC

Apparently, WebAssembly will revolutionize the client-side development. The web apps will be very much like desktop ones: high performing, can be written in any language. At the same time they are cross platform, can be easily distributed, and do not require installation.

Meanwhile, every "builder of web3.0" who's trying to "fix the Internet", or "make the web faster, safer, and more open" is doing it in such a way that back-end development is not required. I.e. they are working on decentralized (either p2p or federated) universal back-ends that they assume should be used by everyone.

Do you believe that in future the back-end development as we know it today will be obsolete as everybody will use some p2p BaaS platform and the web-development will be all about implementing client-side apps?

Re: Ask HN: What is the future of back-end development?

#2

Post by sktrdie » Fri, Aug 12, 2016, 10:09 AM UTC

I think backend will move more towards streaming endpoints (WebSockets). Already with concepts such as Observables we're building apps entirely around streams of events. So to me the connection between frontend and backend will just be what you already use to communicate between your app components (streams). With regards to "where the backend is", it doesn't really matter. It can be on N different servers. What's important is that we'll be able to generalize lots of logic and automate most of the things (things like auth, database writes/reads, etc). Other more specific things we'll always have to write ourselves, but the management of an "actual server" will be more and more abstracted, and we'll eventually deal with it entirely on the app-code side of things.

Re: Ask HN: What is the future of back-end development?

#3

Post by donatj » Fri, Aug 12, 2016, 10:40 AM UTC

Simple Client/server isn't going anywhere anytime soon. It's too simple to implement and understand and use to die. Good enough almost always wins.

Re: Ask HN: What is the future of back-end development?

#4

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Aug 12, 2016, 10:41 AM UTC

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: What is the future of back-end development?

#5

Post by jbb555 » Fri, Aug 12, 2016, 10:41 AM UTC

WebAssembly will not revolutionize anything. It's like java where people claim it's as fast as native code, and yet every single program runs like a dog and takes 100 times the resources. Only worse because it runs in a browser.

Re: Ask HN: What is the future of back-end development?

#6

Post by british_india » Fri, Aug 12, 2016, 10:46 AM UTC

Given the complex services we already have, services that access complex, multi-source databases of the relational and NoSQL kind, I find it amusing that UI developers are so unaware of the complexities of the back end--complexities that are normally hidden from them--that they think they can be reduced to so many calls. WebSockets don't magically assemble complex back-end data. Amusing in the extreme.

Re: Ask HN: What is the future of back-end development?

#7

Post by pauljaworski » Fri, Aug 12, 2016, 10:48 AM UTC

When I started building out the back-end of my latest project, I realized its only purpose was to persist data to a NoSQL database. I had a small epiphany and decided I didn't need to build a server at all - I could just use something like Firebase to accomplish that task.

Now that I'm getting deeper into the project, I need to add in features like PDF generation. No problem! I'll use microservices for that. Well, that means I need to build a Docker container, deploy it to AWS ECS, and configure AWS API Gateway to talk to it. None of these things are what I would consider "front-end" dev work.

Back-end is surely changing, and many of the needs can be shifted to the front-end/BaaS platforms, but there's still plenty of work left! I think we'll see the back-end role transition more toward building and maintaining these microservices and possibly the business logic portions of the front-end.

Re: Ask HN: What is the future of back-end development?

#8

Post by otobrglez » Fri, Aug 12, 2016, 10:50 AM UTC

- More "reactive" frameworks / languages / tools.

- More functional principles and more resilient implementations.

- Complete decoupling from lower levels. Meaning that you don't care about servers anymore. Apps are Dockerized and resources are dedicated automatically.

- No more human designed APIs. Why write APIs if modern machine learning principles can replace the whole concept?

- More lambda / serverless concepts.

- APIs and integrations will be automated and auto discovered.

- More (micro)services, mixing of different languages and stacks.

- More streams, more events,...

Re: Ask HN: What is the future of back-end development?

#9

Post by mrweasel » Fri, Aug 12, 2016, 10:59 AM UTC

The ability to build a solid backend platform and infrastructure is going to be increasingly important in the future. The "backend" is becoming increasingly anonymous (as in not seen, not as in privacy), but it has never been more important.

If nothing else the increasing focus on data collection and processing will push the need for custom backend forward for many years. Any every application that needs to store or share data via an API, needs an backend that understand the data it receives so that it can validate, process and distribute that data correctly.

Backends (custom backends) aren't going away any time soon.

Your question reads as if you believe that "backends" equals desktop applications. Even in that case it's still hard for web application to compete with desktop applications. It's a matter of personal preference of cause, but something like Google Docs feels weirdly restricted, confined and cramped somehow, simply because it lives in the browser.

Re: Ask HN: What is the future of back-end development?

#10

Post by jalfresi » Fri, Aug 12, 2016, 10:59 AM UTC

Personally I don't see any of that happening - client-side app development on the web is a chaotic mess with no "official" (whatever that means) way of doing things. Throw into that mix the constant reinvention thats going on (yeah can't wait to see everything get re-invented AGAIN when web-assembly comes along), for what constitute incredibly marginal gains in the UI space (the web UI was already way fast enough 5 years ago without introducing mind-bending paradigms like react).

On top of all that, the very concept of web apps (in my opinion) is fundamentally flawed in that they break the web (fundamentally flawed in a similar way that Flash as a interactive platform was flawed e.g user interaction along a timeline is an inherent conflict).

So personally I expect all the client-side web app stuff to collapse under its own weight at some point. As a example, I've been a web developer for 20 years, and for my own projects at home I don't even bother with web front ends; I use QML and QT and bang out a great UI in a fraction of the time it takes to produce a web UI. It's not worth the hassle anymore, but then I have the luxury of my own projects not having many (any?) users beside myself.

As for back-end, I've actually seen a shift more towards "systems" e.g a set of isolated sub-systems interacting via event busses or queues over HTTP/JSON either as micro-services or something close to that. Then a separate "web front-end" app pull data for output/display, almost as a client to that system. So a cleaner separation of The Real System from Web Application Back-end. And in this space, things seem to becoming much more standardised means of communication between parts, whilst at the same time there is a Cambrian explosion of new tools, languages etc which can be exploited. There is very much an idea that separate sub-systems can be written in languages which can best take advantage of for the problem space.

It's very interesting to see the differences in the way the front-end and back-end communities are approaching progress/innovation.

Anyway, thats my opinion/view of it all. Sorry for the wall of text