Are Serverside Web Frameworks Becoming Irrelevant?
blog.recursivity.com
Are Serverside Web Frameworks Becoming Irrelevant?
1–10 of 49 posts
Re: Are Serverside Web Frameworks Becoming Irrelevant?
#2I've tried to accomplish a REST API + JS client on a few of my projects, but where I get hung up is session handling.
What I've ended up doing is writing the REST backend and writing the presentation layer in something light, like flask or sinatra, just for session handling.
Re: Are Serverside Web Frameworks Becoming Irrelevant?
#3I agree, this does appear to be the trend. Google also has indexing support for AJAX pages (http://code.google.com/web/ajaxcrawling/index.html) so it's not hard to make a single-page app that is indexable by Google. My concern is that we are building all of this on top of HTTP, which wasn't really meant to be used this way, and there's bound to be some caveats from that. One potential pitfall I can think of is cookie management - the JavaScript APIs to manipulate cookies is very poorly defined easy to make mistakes while using. I think this is doable but we need to tread softly to make sure that we don't introduce new classes of vulnerabilities.
Re: Are Serverside Web Frameworks Becoming Irrelevant?
#4One good thing about JS and a REST backend: there will finally be widespread separation of UI and domain!
Re: Are Serverside Web Frameworks Becoming Irrelevant?
#5No, they are not becoming irrelevant. Frameworks add significant value on the front end as well -- the easiest example is templating, which is a) not natively supported in HTML b) hard to fake with CSS/Javascript and c) virtually required for productivity, consistency, and maintainability.
I suppose one could theoretically fake this by using a script to spit out static HTML served by Apache, but then the combination of Apache and your script is morally equivalent to a server-side web framework.
Session management. Cookies. Sitewide functionality. Asset packing. SSL. Debugging/development tools. Tests. etc, etc, etc, etc
Re: Are Serverside Web Frameworks Becoming Irrelevant?
#6One good thing about JS and a REST backend: there will finally be widespread separation of UI and domain!
This whole separation of UI and domain is the kind of Ivory Tower academic nonsense perpetuated by the DDD folks and many, many others.
Nowhere is this virulent plague more endemic than in the Java world. As the joke goes, the Java programmer's response to any problem is to add just one more layer of abstraction.
And I say this as a Java programmer of some 10+ years experience so please don't take it as mindless Java bashing.
As Joel (the classic Joel of old) would say: all abstractions are leaky. To add my own editorial: the less hand-wringing and self-flagellation about the purity of the uberlanguage, uberframework or uberarchitecture, the better.
Re: Are Serverside Web Frameworks Becoming Irrelevant?
#7No, they are not becoming irrelevant. Frameworks add significant value on the front end as well -- the easiest example is templating, which is a) not natively supported in HTML b) hard to fake with CSS/Javascript and c) virtually required for productivity, consistency, and maintainability. I suppose one could theoretically fake this by using a script to spit out static HTML served by Apache, but then the combination…
There are tools for templating with Javascript, for example https://github.com/jquery/jquery-tmpl
I can imagine that's not so good for search engines.
Re: Are Serverside Web Frameworks Becoming Irrelevant?
#8uh, if you stop working with server side frameworks, how do you serve information to the front end javascript framework? do you intend to just expose your database to the end user's browser?
Re: Are Serverside Web Frameworks Becoming Irrelevant?
#9One good thing about JS and a REST backend: there will finally be widespread separation of UI and domain!
This whole separation of UI and domain is the kind of Ivory Tower academic nonsense perpetuated by the DDD folks and many, many others. Nowhere is this virulent plague more endemic than in the Java world. As the joke goes, the Java programmer's response to any problem is to add just one more layer of abstraction. And I say this as a Java programmer of some 10+ years experience so please don't take it as mindless Java…
Model-UI separation is a pretty basic principle that decent programmers put into practice every day. I find it tends to aid the design process rather than obstruct it.
Re: Are Serverside Web Frameworks Becoming Irrelevant?
#10uh, if you stop working with server side frameworks, how do you serve information to the front end javascript framework? do you intend to just expose your database to the end user's browser?
You've then just moved all data processing to the front-end, and the MVC framework moves into the client. You are then charging the consumer a tax for the processing and battery power of a presentation that could have been served with an infrastructure designed to handle it.
Moving UI to the client does nothing but move the UI to the client - it still has to be done and Javascript performance varies too much for this to be the catch-all option right now.