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Why is modern web development so complicated?

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Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#161

Post by diminoten »

pojzon wrote: post #132
diminoten wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I can assure you "owning" a home-baked software is 10 times harder than anything that is popular. Thats from someone who does that for a living. Modern web-devs move faster than they think, leaving so many doors open. Someone who works on the same system plenty of years had time to patch the doors.

I believe you, I do not do this for a living!

But am I not right to have red flags fly when someone says they built a home-baked web service for managing health care information? Isn't that nuts, from a security perspective?

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#162

Post by scns »

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.

https://mastery.games is fun too

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#163

Post by dwheeler »

Client-side JavaScript is sometimes a good idea, but it's absurd to think that all sites require it, and I think it's grossly overused. Most sites are mostly-static content. If your site is static, HTML and CSS are all you should be using. If it's mostly static, server-side implementations or minor JavaScript sprinklings on HTML and CSS are often simpler, cheaper, and much more maintainable. Server-side implementations tend to be much easier to use, and work just as well when your users disable JavaScript because they want more security and privacy. Accessibility is possible with client-side JavaScript, but it's far cheaper & easier without it. Some sites can't be implemented server-side (or are sensible to do completely disconnected), and then you really do need the interactivity of full-on client-side JavaScript. In my experience, requiring full-on client-side JavaScript tends to be more complex and time-consuming to implement, and often tends to have serious loading time lag (with careful design it can be addressed, but often it never seems to get addressed).

Everything is a trade-off. The usual cause of excessive complexity is engineering based on the latest fad, instead of what is actually the best choice.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#164

Post by castis »

chrshawkes wrote: post #134
castis wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Unhelpful advice. Typical programmer up his own ass bullshit really. Oh that ways not good. Well what's good? I don't know, just not that. Look at how many clowns criticize jQuery these days as an example of garbage software.

Maybe it would be more helpful if I also put on a hostile attitude?

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#166

Post by noonespecial »

reaperducer wrote: post #129
diminoten wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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. The internal and external security audits already performed by the billion-dollar healthcare company in question disagree with you.

Is it bad that the more spent on the audit and the larger the company the less I trust the results?

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#167

Post by castis »

enraged_camel wrote: post #130
castis wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What exactly is actionable about it? Just curious.

Google the inverse question "how to build good software" and dont stop reading until you die?

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#168

Post by crumpets »

TomMarius wrote: post #97
avgDev wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

PHP is way more "batteries included" than C# without ASP.NET

Yeah, unless you have workers, the whole "request is the lifecycle of the app" model of PHP makes it pretty damn hard to get a memory leak.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#169

Post by onion2k »

mort96 wrote: post #150
onion2k wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GitHub works without JS just fine. Switch it off. In fact, I'm pretty sure Github is rendered server side for the first load. You shouldn't be seeing any spinners. I'd check if I wasn't on my phone.

Nope, the content is loaded dynamically from their API after the rest of the page has loaded: https://i.imgur.com/Kxs9l7j.mp4 Sure, the list of my repositories is server rendered, but I already know my list of repositories. The thing I'm waiting for 99% of the time when loading github.com is to see if there's any new activity. Sorry about the graphical glitches, blame nvidia or xorg or gnome or something.

That's disappointing. You're absolutely right that that particular page should be SSR'd.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#170

Post by nfgu »

avgDev wrote: post #74
anthony_doan wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It is entirely possible to import things like EntityFramework, Razor and Identity Framework without using ASP.NET MVC itself.

Just because the framework uses them by default it doesn't mean they can't be used separately.

You can use Razor Pages or a router like Nancy[1] without having to roll your own ORM or View Library.

[1] https://github.com/NancyFx/Nancy

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