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Why is modern web development so complicated?

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Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#71

Post by GeorgeTirebiter »

the-pigeon wrote: post #13
amiga-workbench wrote: post #7

Because web developers have massive a chip on their shoulder about not being """real""" developers. So now we have meme frameworks and transpilers and hysterical build toolchains all for a platform for sharing documents.

I've been working as a full stack web developer for the last 15 years during this transformation and this couldn't be further from the truth. No full stack developer feels they aren't a real developer. But I think more than anything the full stack's have been the drive of a lot of this complications because all these complications make everything way easier for us. Web development today is easy (compared to 15 years…

I would greatly appreciate, given your 15 years as a full stack developer, that you explain what you are using today, and (hopefully) why. I'm also curious if you might have some vision for the future?

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#72

Post by acdha »

ayushgp wrote: post #37
eswat wrote: post #15

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.

> 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.

That's what developers talk about. What normal people care about is the user experience: did an action take a long time, did it reset their context or fail into a confusing state, does the reload button work / can they share a link with someone else, etc.

That's an important distinction because using an SPA means an order of magnitude more code has to work perfectly before it's not a regression on one of those points. It's a lot easier than it used to be but, as we've seen over and over again, there are still many cases where people have a bad experience because the developer assumed everyone is fine downloading 5MB of JavaScript before displaying text & images, errors never happen, etc.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#73

Post by afarrell »

TotempaaltJ wrote: post #65
orf wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And here's the trick to not building shit software: don't build shit software. It's a crude way to put it, but the reality is that you can build bad websites in any framework (including old PHP stuff and new JavaScript hype). You can also build good websites in any framework. It depends way more on the organisation or team developing it than on the libraries you use.

The trouble is that "don't build shit software" isn't actionable advice on how to avoid building shit software. For someone seeking to be a more skillful web software engineer, there's no information there.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#74

Post by avgDev »

anthony_doan wrote: post #55
reaperducer wrote: post #38

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…

You don't even use a backend rendering framework? MVC PHP frameworks are very nice and they don't move as fast as those javascript frontend rendering. Also the ORM deals with any security problems and most framework deals with other security deals too including session handling.

This seems odd to me. I have been working in .Net MVC/Core and while I could write an application that is simply HTML/CSS/C#, I would think it would be insane to do so.

It takes a massive amount of resources to develop your own security, your own data access without any ORM tools, not cause memory leaks, properly disposing of resource.

I'm all about creating reliable applications, but a good framework is a great tool.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#75

Post by dpau »

orf wrote: post #59
reaperducer wrote: post #38

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.

was just about to comment along these lines! i never understood those eschewing frameworks... in the above example a PHP framework like Laravel is in constant development by lots of people, with security updates and refinements pushed out on a regular basis. even if u are an uber-developer, in what situation is rolling your own ever the right choice? is your project that different from everyone else's?

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#76

Post by Townley »

reaperducer wrote: post #38

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…

Recognizing the right tool for the job landed you job security for the next two years (and you're deserve it!)

But it could have very easily gone the other way. If your website had complicated validation rules on multi-page forms (not unheard of in healthcare) the site would be better off for some basic state management interacting with a standardized authentication/authorization framework that you didn't have to write.

From what you're describing, it sounds like you did right by the client in this circumstance. But sometimes, it does have to be complicated. And in those circumstances, frameworks and javascript (unlike garbage) have an important place.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#77

Post by president »

As someone who hasn't done much web development in the last 10 years, it is mind-boggling how much you need to know in order to be a full-stack engineer these days. I tried to start a project a few months ago and just trying to decide on a technology was difficult. Npm, Gulp, Grunt, Webpack, React vs Vue vs Angular...I don't even know what half of these tools even do, why they're needed, not to mention the learning curve to get up to speed.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#78

Post by afarrell »

heyoni wrote: post #40
hajile wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flexbox? That's way easier than float design and both of those are way easier than designing everything with tables.

I know...and I kind of got the gist of it except I had a lot of trouble developing an intuition for it by trying to understand the history, other methods and just basically copying source code from existing websites...it's just my process for learning new things and it quickly gets overwhelming with front-end development...

Repeatedly playing https://flexboxfroggy.com/ is better for developing intuition.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#79

Post by mark_and_sweep »

efficax wrote: post #53
mark_and_sweep wrote: post #43

I think the default should be: Don't use any JavaScript if you don't have to. And if you have to, use it responsibly. Recommended reading: - "Responsible JavaScript: Part I" by Jeremy Wagner ( https://alistapart.com/article/responsible-javascript-part-1... ) - "A JavaScript-Free Frontend" by Matt Reyer ( https://dev.to/winduptoy/a-javascript-free-frontend-2d3e ) Disclaimer: I'm from Germany, but have a 6-y/o Android…

javascript rules, and you can't build truly interactive sites without it (try to build a refine-as-you-type search bar with just html and css). Here's my hot take: JS is good and has made the web better.

Here's my hot take: Instead of waiting 20s for your truly interactive site with refine-as-you-type search bar to load, which, when finally loaded, will lag so much on my mobile connection that it is just plain annoying, I will use your competitor's site which loads within 1s and has a plain old field for search.

Not every site needs to be truly interactive. Not every site needs JS. Unless you're building a 3G+ or desktop-only web experience, use it responsibly.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#80

Post by Supermancho »

the-pigeon wrote: post #13
amiga-workbench wrote: post #7

Because web developers have massive a chip on their shoulder about not being """real""" developers. So now we have meme frameworks and transpilers and hysterical build toolchains all for a platform for sharing documents.

I've been working as a full stack web developer for the last 15 years during this transformation and this couldn't be further from the truth. No full stack developer feels they aren't a real developer. But I think more than anything the full stack's have been the drive of a lot of this complications because all these complications make everything way easier for us. Web development today is easy (compared to 15 years…

> Web development today is easy (compared to 15 years ago) once you know this toolchain

Web development is harder for the simpler tasks that were common 15 years ago. It's harder so the harder (or impossible) tasks of yesterday, today and beyond, are easier for some values of harder and easier related to time and custom coding.

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