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Why is modern web development so complicated?

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Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#101

Post by itronitron »

tschellenbach wrote: post #10

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.

SPAs don't need to be complicated, people have been developing native GUIs for decades. The source of the problem is the browser event and rendering loop which remains a mystery.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#102

Post by void445be54d48a »

afarrell wrote: post #73
TotempaaltJ wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Just don't build software and then we won't have shit software

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#103

Post by heyoni »

afarrell wrote: post #78
heyoni wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I absolutely need to get back into front-end so thanks for that!

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#104

Post by castis »

afarrell wrote: post #73
TotempaaltJ wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It most certainly is actionable advice, but it's usefulness depends on how well you take blunt advice.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#105

Post by nfgu »

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.

You can use rendering libraries, ORMs and session management libraries without a framework.

I think it's way nicer. I much prefer environments like Sinatra, Express or Flask than full-blown MVC frameworks.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#106

Post by orf »

dpau wrote: post #75
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.

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?

I remember seeing this one post on HN from some PHP consultancy that had open sourced some kind of PHP web app that was "engineered from the start to be secure".

I took a look at the code on GitHub and it was absolutely horrible. They basically built their own mini-framework, poorly, with mixed concerns and poor, ad-hoc and inconsistent validation everywhere. Terrible.

I left an issue on GitHub with my findings and got into an argument with the author in the HN submission about how it's disingenous to say something is engineered from the ground up to be secure, if you're eschewing all the man hours that have gone into something like Larvel. I think his reasoning boiled down to "Larvel has CVE's so it's not secure".

Some people are just like that I guess.

Edit: found it - "How We Engineered CMS Airship to Be Simply Secure" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13905055

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#107

Post by arendtio »

I think the structure of that post is a fitting portrayal of the structure of modern frontend development... And no, I am not one of those JavaScript naysayers. In fact, I started building my first Progressive Web App three years ago.

But what I feel quite frustrated about, is the pace at which tools become obsolete. It seems that you can be happy if you have two projects which actually use the same set of tools. And every time you want to fix a bug in some project which you didn't touch for a few months, you run into some kind of trouble while updating the dependencies.

Just today, I spent an hour getting a project to build again, which I built two years ago. I just hope that in the near future the community will settle on a common set of tools which will become stable and stay for a decade or so.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#108

Post by cannedslime »

jonplackett wrote: post #83

Why has no-one made a tool that worked like Flash. I get that the flash plugin sucked and was a battery hog. But the development environment was quite decent. I'd love to be able to make HTML5 content in the same kind of way.

The problem with that, is that flash even as an IDE was not really suited our new responsive web. Its not really good for content or development of anything other than games, animations and ads.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#109

Post by orf »

justbaker wrote: post #94
afarrell wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It means the underlying problem is not the tooling, but the use of the tooling. In other words, "I can choose the correct tool but still fail from poor approach of problem."

If the tool allows you to shoot yourself in the face without warning, and has a reputation/history of doing it to a lot of other people, then the tooling is indeed the problem.
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