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Escaping the SPA rabbit hole with modern Rails

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Re: Escaping the SPA rabbit hole with modern Rails

#51

Post by sho »

zmmmmm wrote: post #27
lucidone wrote: post #15

Are you building a website? The practices espoused by the author will be ideal. Are you building a web app? Will you have a mobile client alongside your web app? Using a javascript framework for your client(s) and decoupling your data from it's presentation will be a fruitful investment. All of these frameworks and their associated happened for reasons, and they didn't involve traditional MVC being good enough for ev…

> It also lead to a culture of staunch refusal to learn or do anything new in that job I find one of the most difficult aspects of software is the very powerful "local minima" of effective (but not optimal) techniques combined with entrenched knowledge. People are so incredibly biased towards what they know well, and that bias is backed by objective evidence: when they do it X-way they are objectively faster AND bett…

I totally agree, but I thought it was funny that you invoked the concept of local minima - I have only ever heard that concept in terms of local maxima, ie locally-but-perhaps-not-globally maximal productivity, comfort zone, etc. I assume you are referring to a locally/globally minimal resistance, time taken, or some such?

Anyway I just thought it interesting that you might make valid reference to a very useful concept I've heard and used many times, and yet in your expression the "polarity", as such, is totally inverted! And yet I understood you anyway. A computer would be totally confused.

Re: Escaping the SPA rabbit hole with modern Rails

#52

Post by peteforde »

I have nothing against SPAs for complex UI interactions. It's sort of like taking anti-biotics; there should be a moment of reflection when you should justify your true need, lest the cure be worse than the disease. Most developers of a certain age have come up when it's SPA by default, and can't truly defend why they need it.

In this thread, there are several claims that it's impossible to write well-organized jQuery. That sounds an awful lot like dogma to me. Also, your inability to write well-organized code says more about your coding and team-management skills than it does about any one approach. Any tech is only as good as the team using it.

A few years ago, Sam Stephenson (who originally wrote the Prototype library, before jQuery was a thing) gave an excellent talk on Turbolinks at RailsConf. I recommend the whole talk (turn it up to 1.5x speed, of course) but at 4:12 he does an amazing job of showing how the SPA path leads to insanity.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWEts0rlezA

Here's a mental exercise for you: the next time you start a new project, instead of deciding which SPA framework to use, start with an assumption that an SPA is wild overkill for the first iteration of your application - especially if few people on your team have working expertise with the SPA in question. Then see if you can argue FOR the tech. It's much harder to justify something you don't need if you start with an honest conversation about how you probably don't need it. (This works for throwing out CDs, too: start with the assumption that they are all garbage, they all go. Then force yourself to make logic-based arguments for each one you keep. Your outcome will be night and day from if you start with everything in a keep pile.)

Re: Escaping the SPA rabbit hole with modern Rails

#53

Post by adrianN »

sho wrote: post #51
zmmmmm wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It also lead to a culture of staunch refusal to learn or do anything new in that job I find one of the most difficult aspects of software is the very powerful "local minima" of effective (but not optimal) techniques combined with entrenched knowledge. People are so incredibly biased towards what they know well, and that bias is backed by objective evidence: when they do it X-way they are objectively faster AND bett…

I totally agree, but I thought it was funny that you invoked the concept of local minima - I have only ever heard that concept in terms of local maxima , ie locally-but-perhaps-not-globally maximal productivity, comfort zone, etc. I assume you are referring to a locally/globally minimal resistance, time taken, or some such? Anyway I just thought it interesting that you might make valid reference to a very useful conc…

Local minima come from optimization problems as you encounter for example in Machine Learning. You usually want to minimize some error function (e.g. misclassified objects). Unless you take great care these functions are riddled with local minima where naive optimization gets stuck.

Re: Escaping the SPA rabbit hole with modern Rails

#54

Post by greenhatman »

wjossey wrote: post #6

To the author of the article- Kudos! Well written, well reasoned, with minimal hyperbole or unnecessary “X is dead” style declarations. Hope we see more writing like this bubble up to the top on HN. I’m not swayed by the argument, but that’s personal bias. I’m the technical cofounder / solo coder of a venture backed startup, and I built our platform on rails 5. I migrated our front end to Vue over the winter and coul…

How do you handle SSR for SEO? Or do you not need SEO?

Re: Escaping the SPA rabbit hole with modern Rails

#55

Post by stevebmark »

Rails is a deeply flawed framework, and we need to stop using Basecamp as the example of a well designed monolith. Basecamp is terrible software, and the crappiness of the user interface appears to be a direct result of not being able to build rich interfaces as its coupled to legacy Rails designs like this article suggests. Basecamp being fast while getting a trickle of traffic and working with very little data is not a selling point against SPAs (I'm not pro or con SPA).

Re: Escaping the SPA rabbit hole with modern Rails

#56

Post by manquer »

wjossey wrote: post #6

To the author of the article- Kudos! Well written, well reasoned, with minimal hyperbole or unnecessary “X is dead” style declarations. Hope we see more writing like this bubble up to the top on HN. I’m not swayed by the argument, but that’s personal bias. I’m the technical cofounder / solo coder of a venture backed startup, and I built our platform on rails 5. I migrated our front end to Vue over the winter and coul…

My experiences are pretty much the same, the important distinction was when we added support for mobile apps, the API design problems had to be solved anyway, and significant differences between the interfaces for both mobile and web made it a pain to work with, we shifted to full API driven back-end and ember front-end and I cannot be happier.

I think the author is missing the fact that it it hard to justify Rails only approach if you have to support mobile interfaces and HTML is not only medium you are working with.

Re: Escaping the SPA rabbit hole with modern Rails

#57

Post by SpaceNugget »

sho wrote: post #18
cmjqol wrote: post #16

Like others comments , Kudos to the authors. I'm an SPA Lover ( Angular , Vue ) , but still most of the points raised here a coherent from a back end perspective. That said , a lot of the arguments are basically summed up as : "I don't like Front End Dev. because it's not as mature as Back End". I will not lie on this point , JS is a fast evolving ecosystem that sometimes has issues to stabilize. Hence , there is a l…

I think you've missed the article's point: > I don't like Front End Dev. because it's not as mature as Back End No, he says don't do FE and BE when the tools for back end-only (well, Rails is full stack, actually) are so useful and productive. And in the rest of your comment you seem to forget that a front end is completely useless without a back end. > you are ROR or Django or ASP.NET dev and you love what you do ?…

Uh, you can definitely implement a standard CRUD app with one of the serverless platforms. You can even throw an entire expressjs application into a lambda function with minimal modification if you want.

Re: Escaping the SPA rabbit hole with modern Rails

#58

Post by manquer »

Mc_Big_G wrote: post #8

Without any input from me and several other js devs in our org, it was decided that we'll do a complete rewrite of our Ember.js app in React. The primary reason stated was hiring and the secondary was build times. The first should have been performance but they've been pretending like performance doesn't matter and that it's good enough. It's not. Since it's easier to develop, our backend admin system is built in .NE…

>> Backend devs suddenly become full-stack devs

this is the reason we moved in the other direction, in my limited experience, people would should really backend devs doing frontend work because you framework/ arch is full stack and requires it, has been terrible

Re: Escaping the SPA rabbit hole with modern Rails

#59

Post by cmjqol »

SpaceNugget wrote: post #57
sho wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you've missed the article's point: > I don't like Front End Dev. because it's not as mature as Back End No, he says don't do FE and BE when the tools for back end-only (well, Rails is full stack, actually) are so useful and productive. And in the rest of your comment you seem to forget that a front end is completely useless without a back end. > you are ROR or Django or ASP.NET dev and you love what you do ?…

Uh, you can definitely implement a standard CRUD app with one of the serverless platforms. You can even throw an entire expressjs application into a lambda function with minimal modification if you want.

> You can even throw an entire expressjs application into a lambda function

This is the first general misconception with serverless.

Serverless is not lambda . If you think serverless == lambda, it's like saying cloud == ec2 . You're missing the point of it.

Re: Escaping the SPA rabbit hole with modern Rails

#60

Post by cmjqol »

sho wrote: post #18
cmjqol wrote: post #16

Like others comments , Kudos to the authors. I'm an SPA Lover ( Angular , Vue ) , but still most of the points raised here a coherent from a back end perspective. That said , a lot of the arguments are basically summed up as : "I don't like Front End Dev. because it's not as mature as Back End". I will not lie on this point , JS is a fast evolving ecosystem that sometimes has issues to stabilize. Hence , there is a l…

I think you've missed the article's point: > I don't like Front End Dev. because it's not as mature as Back End No, he says don't do FE and BE when the tools for back end-only (well, Rails is full stack, actually) are so useful and productive. And in the rest of your comment you seem to forget that a front end is completely useless without a back end. > you are ROR or Django or ASP.NET dev and you love what you do ?…

Serveverless is not lambda. If you think so , you are mistaken , it's like saying Cloud == EC2 .
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