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Why is modern web development so complicated?

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Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#181

Post by itronitron »

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 think the main problem with the current Javascript UI frameworks is that they introduce an 'abstract middleman'that distances developers from what is actually happening in the browser. I expect there are many web developers unfamiliar enough with MVC that they are drawn to the Javascript frameworks even though MVC isn't a particularly difficult concept.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#182

Post by chiefalchemist »

I'm not blaming the tools, but too often, at least (for me) based on multiple interactions with various devs/engineers - yes, sometimes on Twitter :) - tools are proudly spoken of as a proxy for quality product. That is, I'm using the latest wiz-bam shiny new object tool so the users of the product must be overjoyed.

Nah. Nobody cares. I think that bears repeating...Nobody cares.

My mum has __never__ said to me "I love React" or "Isn't Bootstrap the best." But she __has__ complained to me about a site/app being buggy, confusing, difficult, etc. I've said the same to myself too many times to count. I think we all have.

A couple months ago, I read an article about (frontend) tools and how important X, Y and/or Z are. The author's product had a repo on GH. There were 700+ issues. All I could think was, "Apparently those tools have given his team a false sense of security. Looks like they've bitten over more than they can chew." I filed the article under: Just because you can, doesn't mean you should.

Years ago, I remember reading an answer on Quora (when Quora still mattered) that included:

"A fool with a tool is still a fool."

I don't think I'll even forget that line. It's so true. I'm not against tools. I'm just not in favor of those who claim tool X, Y or Z is a panacea.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#183

Post by chrshawkes »

castis wrote: post #164
chrshawkes wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I'm not being hostile, I apologize if you took it that way. I'm just making a point about how so many dev's claim to have the right answer until you need to rely on them to get something done. Projects turn to a mess mostly due to things one single person cannot control. I don't know a single person, including myself, who've thought that their code didn't look like shit 6 months to a year down the road. I think we always get better and we'll always criticize what we don't know and understand. This includes mountains of other peoples code (garbage or not).

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#184

Post by diminoten »

crumpets wrote: post #175
diminoten wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

No, you're not right. How you render CSS and the page have very little to do with how secure your app is. SQL escaping, session handling, etc all come easily with standard php libraries. So "I didn't bother with any PHP frameworks" doesn't mean the dev wrote an SQL connector.

I'm sorry if you thought I meant CSS rendering was the source of potential vulnerabilities, but for any website that has, say, users, if you're not using any PHP frameworks or external libraries you might have to implement some crypto of your own to store passwords securely, just for starters. I don't think PHP offers a standard library to do that, does it?

There are a hundred examples that are specific to whatever app this guy built for the Healthcare company, not all of which are covered by the PHP standard library...

I believe him when he says it passed external/internal auditing, however I have a very hard time believing he's not either very very expensive or took a very very long time to get the app to the place he claims it is (the third option is that it does very little, which won't actually end up being a good thing once the client gets over the honeymoon phase of "it's so much prettier!!!").

Further, the expertise I do bring to this conversation is in software development, and I can say assuredly that a one-man development team using no 3rd party libraries is definitely creating a codebase nigh unmaintainable by other people down the line. His bragging about creating job security for 2 years is honestly an understatement; he's got job security for the life of the products he's creating, as he's likely the only person who can do anything more with the website in a time frame that isn't measured in years.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#185

Post by eddieh »

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…

I once worked on a team of about 30 people building a website for a university that could have been a team of one dev and one designer and a static site generator.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#186

Post by weberc2 »

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.

These are strawmen arguments. No one is arguing that libraries matter more than organizations/teams, and no one is arguing that it's impossible to build good/bad frameworks in any given language/framework/etc. You can (and should!) solve the problems with your teams and your tools. If you pick a tool that solves problems you don't have (probably because it's new and shiny), there are probably hidden costs that you didn't consider and you're probably going to slow your team down. How much that slow down is going to affect your project depends on how significant the slow-down is and how sensitive your project is to developer productivity (the widely used internal tool with the big budget at BIG CORP is probably safe, but the team at the small startup with the shoestring budget and fierce competition is going to feel that friction in a bad way.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#187

Post by lhorie »

mstipetic wrote: post #172
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…

I don't think you're being fair. I certanly agree that a lot of things that should be simple are over-engineered simply for the sake of it, but there are a lot of things that are made possible by modern frameworks. I'm really not trying to plug our thing now, but if you look at this [1], a short tech demo of the platform we're building, there's no way it could have been built without modern frameworks with the amount…

That looks pretty simple in terms of UI...

There certainly are some types of apps that are mind-bogglingly complex (e.g. press play and scroll around on https://kepler.gl/demo/nyctrips for one vivid example) but ironically, the real heavy lifting is mostly done with specialized libraries and super-close-to-the-metal code (GSLS), whereas the "modern" stack only powers the "simple" boxy UI glue stuff.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#188

Post by ceejayoz »

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.

I can't speak to your specific case, but I've seen a tool "pass" a billion-dollar company's auditing because the scanner they used never got past the login screen and their folks never noticed that fact.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#189

Post by wolco »

orf wrote: post #106
dpau wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 g…

Messy code is not insecure code and clean looking code is not secure code by default.

It could be a signal of sloppyness or writing it in vim.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#190

Post by johnchristopher »

gen220 wrote: post #142
void445be54d48a wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I know this was probably meant as tongue-in-cheek, but I think this is a powerful idea. I think it should be a more widespread idea that people should aim to leave a company with a net-negative `cloc` contribution.

Actually, that's a well know mantra: the best code is no code.
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