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The software stack is a natural phenomenon that adds to web design's complexity. Ever changing and never complacent, it continues to shape new features that weren't conceivable in the past.
It doesn't have to be complicated, if you get support from above. A few weeks ago I launched a new web site for a health care company. HTML, PHP, CSS, and MySQL. No frameworks. No javascript. No garbage. It replaced a site that was a mess of javascript libraries on top of frameworks on top of a half dozen jquery version and on and on and on. The company administrators, doctors, practitioners, etc... are so happy with…
Damn, you broke into my top-secret consulting role ;) I completely agree with all of this. There is probably a billion-dollar market out there for rewriting garbage business apps that were developed using the hipster tech flavor of the week.
Someone else mentioned SPAs. I 100% guarantee that no user in the world ever wished for their “back” button not to work as they expected.
Calling themselves “full stack engineers” is another symptom of this.
It's complicated because the bar in terms of user experience went up (or so they say) and now everyone wants a SPA. Because of this you now have a generation of devs that only knows how to build SPA. I'm actually thinking to move some stuff from Django to Gatsby/React setup just because everyone knows React, and a lot of our new devs don't know Django/Python.
It doesn't have to be complicated, if you get support from above. A few weeks ago I launched a new web site for a health care company. HTML, PHP, CSS, and MySQL. No frameworks. No javascript. No garbage. It replaced a site that was a mess of javascript libraries on top of frameworks on top of a half dozen jquery version and on and on and on. The company administrators, doctors, practitioners, etc... are so happy with…
Did you consider that the next developer might well come along and post a similar comment: > It replaced a site that was pretty much a home-grown PHP framework written by a single developer. Random mixed logic in templates, hard to update CSS and a poorly designed 'not-an-ORM' ORM. Not to say that your rewrite is like that, but one man's garbage is another man's treasure.
It depends way more on the organisation or team developing it than on the libraries you use.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think we’ve done a great job of convincing each other within our tech bubble than everyone wants a SPA. Not sure the general public cares for our enthusiasm though.
Everyone(well almost) wants a SPA or at the very least non reloading pages. No one wants to reload the page with every action they perform or if only a part of the area on screen needed to be updated and the page was reloaded anyways.
To me it just seems that most SPAs that I see, are either so small that the page load of a django app would also be fast enough, or they are so overloaded with stuff and advertising, that I feel like the performance benefit of SPAs has just been reinvested in cluttering more. Also, facebook, who built react, don't seem to have embraced the SPA.
I guess there will be a sweet spot, also on whether you build "pages" or "apps". Maybe there is a point of interactivity that warrants a SPA. I just don't feel like many websites hit this, like microblogging/twitter/etc.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Heh. I kinda felt: "hey, I agree with that", so I started asking myself why. What's the difference? Somehow, it looks like the difference is that on one side you have a very complicated problem but in a potentially well defined and bounded environment, and on the other you may have "smaller" problems, but on an environment so vast and complex that's kinda impossible to assert that you are doing things "properly". The…
To me, the difference feels like in one scenario you are solving problems fundamental to computing and the other you are struggling to wrangle with a dumb arbitrary API that someone made up. The former is much more exciting to me, and I suspect most CS people. That's not to say web development is all dumb arbitrary API's or you don't get to solve interesting problems, just much less cool/interesting IMO.
Having done a lot of systems programming, my main complaint is that I'm almost always dealing with other people's models. I might be coming across fundamental problems in algorithms, but those are a tiny part of my work.
I don't know, but I do know I would rather fix a race condition on a multithreaded application than figure out how flexbox works or even understand all the different parts of the DOM.
I think this would be true if the race condition was in my own code, but doing this against another codebase would be pretty brutal...
Part of the reason Flexbox/DOM is painful is that it's very much "someone else's view/code/logic/etc."
Because we're no longer making websites, we're making apps. Sure if you just need a simple website, make it from scratch, but good luck maintaining a full blown app using jQuery. It's not just web development that is hard. You can't honestly say any toolchain on the desktop side is any easier. That said, web development is getting easier now that the dust is settling and only a few major frameworks are used. Get star…
Why, yes. Yes, I can. Delphi, for example. Visual Basic. Frankly, I think Cocoa and Gtk+ are easier.
It isn’t. With modern frameworks (e.g. React + Typescript + some CSS framework), it is surprisingly straightforward to build the front ends for highly complex applications.