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Why is modern web development so complicated?

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Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#81

Post by acdha »

rochak wrote: post #39
s_y_n_t_a_x wrote: post #9

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…

I disagree with your ending note. I like React and have been using it professionally for over 2 years, but I wouldn’t recommend anyone to use something just because it is an industry standard. At my work, for example, the upper management is now convinced that microservices are going to solve all of their current maintainability problems, while the fact is that there are a lot of employees that write shit code, who w…

I might pick a nicer phrasing for your last point: if your team is not good at clean architecture (separation of concerns, conceptual model, etc.), microservices will “solve” that in the same way that adding gasoline solves a fire. If your team has gotten better at that, however, it might be a good strategy for migrating pieces out of an old system.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#82

Post by vcanales »

These "i hate debugging wandering pixels" and "i don't want to figure out why my css doesn't work" opinions sounds like they come from people who aren't really front end developers; like they come from the kind of dev who would sit and complain about the frontend devs on their company, thinking that they're a lower class of people.

I've been working on the server- and client-side of the web for about 10 years now, and I can't recall running into these "wandering pixel" issues they talk about in the past ~4 years.

Frontend development is not just about building a cute website for grandma anymore, and that's why it's complicated. We're passing more responsibilities to the browser, and we have to care about performance when doing work there, and that's why it's complicated. Writing performant software for an unknown machine is hard, and that's why it's complicated.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#84

Post by jjcm »

Because it had to play catch up to native apps feature wise due to demand, while building upon a base that wasn't intended for that, while serving the same app to literally thousands of different environments and expecting it to work perfectly.

Thus, growing pains and overly complicated frameworks/plugins/other bits slapped together to address the core issues which ballooned the complexity. But we all knew that.

What's more impressive is that things are getting less complicated. Browser monoculture, while bad for the freedom of the web, is going to simplify things radically. Only having to target rolling releases for Firefox and Webkit? That's a dream from a cross-plat support side. Also javascript is actually pretty good now. Webcomponents once Chrome 77 drops and Firefox matches parity will finally be production worthy, and they're actually quite easy to build. I've been making static sites with them recently and it feels so much cleaner than going with a React or other component library approach that uses a vdom. The HTML is readable again, and there isn't any needed compilation step or crazy npm dependencies.

While it will never be as easy as it was back in the mosaic days, web dev is simplifying.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#87

Post by nsfmc »

swiley wrote: post #14
s_y_n_t_a_x wrote: post #9

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…

You can’t get simpler than Python and tkinter (or just strait TCL/tk.) Packaging these without depending on preinstalled software is hard (you probably shouldn’t even bother trying on Linux, everyone there expects installing weird stuff to involve using either git or a container anyway.) As far as I can tell the main reason people don’t use it is that it can’t make iPhone apps.

great, now you have a native client but now your customers will expect that it works offline, so now you're building a sync system for your app.

additionally, if your app has any design/layout issues, now you need to hire for people that can do visual layout using tcl/tk.

If your app consumes rich text, you're in for a real treat as you are now on the hook for figuring out how to manage that as well (in addition to serialization, you also need it to likely be emitted into some web friendly format anyway. if your app consumes some feed (say new-user facing features or whatever), you need to find some meta-format that your app can use to layout that content (or i mean, i guess you can use a webview, but then...)

if your customers are enterprise-ey, you are now dealing with some overzealous IT dept that is skeptical of your application running with user permissions.

if you're trying to push a fix/update to your users, you now need to build infra around deploying new apps as well as customer support determining if users are somehow running old versions when they report a bug.

the web is a total "mo money, mo problems" situation, but i think people dismiss how many problems the web solves for your developers on a day to day basis: easy to push updates, simple to whitelist your app's domain on some restricted network, easy add dynamic content/layout to portions of your app with stored content, (less sync resolution issues because your app probably requires network to operate) etc. Native apps have their own issues, they're great, don't get me wrong, but people demand a lot from basic apps of any stripe these days, and as those requirements increase, so does the amount of complexity that developers need to manage at all stages of the pipeline.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#88

Post by onion2k »

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…

What tech you use is much less important than the way you use it. If you build great stuff that works well your clients will be happy, and they'll give you more work. It's not complicated.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#89

Post by diminoten »

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…

Yeah, because the people hiring you have no clue what kind of a maintainability hellscape you're leaving for the next person...

Also I'm 97% sure I could own your site in under a day, based on how home-baked you just said it is, and I'm garbage at pen testing.

Healthcare site, you say? Jesus Christ, I hope they have data breach insurance.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#90

Post by paavohtl »

justicezyx wrote: post #5

AFAIK, any modern development is so complicated. Setup a web server: * VM from Cloud provider * Installing a bunch of staff * Throwing in a k8s cluster * Service mesh * Yaml files * Various network configuration * DNS * Firewall * Security etc.

Alternatively: provision a Heroku dyno, add a single-line Procfile, git push heroku and you're done.
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