Why is modern web development so complicated? • Hacker News Board

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#251

Post by diminoten » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 9:31 PM UTC

jasonlotito wrote: post #240

diminoten wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

> I don't think PHP offers a standard library to do that, does it? https://www.php.net/manual/en/password.installation.php "There is no installation needed to use these functions; they are part of the PHP core." The functions are common knowledge in the community, and made to be easy to use. > Further, the expertise I do bring to this conversation is in software development, and I can say assuredly that a one-man dev…

I don't think someone nitpicking between the definition of the words "framework" and "library" is engaging in this conversation honestly, and I'm pretty sure that your failure to address the "this is but one of hundreds of examples, not all of which are covered by standard libraries in PHP" comment I made is further justification of that belief.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#252

Post by ng12 » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 9:31 PM UTC

icedchai wrote: post #21

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 disagree with the first part (they are real developers!), but agree with the second. We have grafted an application platform on top of a document delivery platform.

> We have grafted an application platform on top of a document delivery platform.

The problem is this is incredibly valuable and we have no good alternatives. There is simply no better format for deploying applications than the web.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#253

Post by Theodores » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 9:32 PM UTC

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.

> Hard to update CSS.

When was the last time you had a go at CSS? So much has changed since 2017. You can chuck out the pre-processor junk and just use CSS variables and CSS Grid. Productivity is 10x.

You can even keep it simple so that a page just loads the CSS it needs instead of some 40,000 line ball of junk.

Same with templates, if you are using CSS Grid you don't need the sea of div containers, you can just use actual content elements from HTML5 and never use a div.

Pseudo-selectors mean you don't need spans. You can get pretty things done without the markup in the document. Once you write HTML this way you wonder what on earth people are doing with these impossible toolchain and impossible HTML web pages. Regular development from about five years ago with frameworks and jQuery nonsense just looks like hacks.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#254

Post by Roritharr » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 9:33 PM UTC

geegoo wrote: post #218

reaperducer wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure it's possible. Someone may come along who is all into DrupalPress and Agilereactboxqueryhack and think it's primitive. But they won't be able to say it's not maintainable, upgradable, or scalable. And it's documented out the wazoo, all the way down to the CSS both in code and in the accompanying PDFs. The last developer gave zero thought to who would come next. I've given great thought, and included the occa…

There are pros and cons to this. One con is that the next developer might have to spend considerable time buying into your ecosystem to be productive. A pro is that it is easily maintainable by you since you built it; which is also a con since it's not generally feasible for a single developer to cover all the in's and out's of a web ecosystem. Lets say you pass away tomorrow, and a week from now a major security vul…

From my experience, going through a vanilla php app to fix a CVE is a much better experience than praying to the Framework Powers that be to have your patch ready and non-breaking when you need it.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#255

Post by CiPHPerCoder » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 9:34 PM UTC

fizixer wrote: post #198

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…

Questions for PHP, and MySQL folks (not meant in a negative way): - PHP: A few years ago I heard about how PHP was needlessly complex. I wonder what the recent status of the programming language is. Specifically, do experienced PHP programmers stick to a subset of PHP, as in "PHP: The good parts"? (similar to "Javascript: The good parts"). (side note: As a diehard python person frustrated due to latest versions becom…

> Specifically, do experienced PHP programmers stick to a subset of PHP, as in "PHP: The good parts"?

See: https://phptherightway.com

Modern PHP development comes in the form of loading dependencies from Composer/Packagist, rather than offloading a lot of bloat to the language. Lots of things have been deprecated (and even removed, like ext/mcrypt).

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#256

Post by Roritharr » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 9:35 PM UTC

Theodores wrote: post #253

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.

> Hard to update CSS. When was the last time you had a go at CSS? So much has changed since 2017. You can chuck out the pre-processor junk and just use CSS variables and CSS Grid. Productivity is 10x. You can even keep it simple so that a page just loads the CSS it needs instead of some 40,000 line ball of junk. Same with templates, if you are using CSS Grid you don't need the sea of div containers, you can just use…

Honest Question, how do I support our IE 11 Customers (8% of our MRR) with this approach?

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#257

Post by wolco » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 9:35 PM UTC

fizixer wrote: post #198

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…

Questions for PHP, and MySQL folks (not meant in a negative way): - PHP: A few years ago I heard about how PHP was needlessly complex. I wonder what the recent status of the programming language is. Specifically, do experienced PHP programmers stick to a subset of PHP, as in "PHP: The good parts"? (similar to "Javascript: The good parts"). (side note: As a diehard python person frustrated due to latest versions becom…

I think the discussion point was php was too easy and that encouraged new developers or less hardcore developers to adopt it.

Some of the defaults like globals being turned on by default led to security holes. How people were creating sql statements at the time concating strings led to sql injection issues.

There were never any bad parts . There are new features like the spread operator that are newer and not available in earlier versions. I try to stay away from them if I think the application will need to run on older versions but otherwise I feel like I can use any feature.

Postgres needs to run under a specific os user. That alone makes it a poor MySQL replacement

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#258

Post by aphextron » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 9:35 PM UTC

Web development is complicated because it is no longer web development. It's application development. And nontrivial applications are, by definition, complicated.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#259

Post by Jach » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 9:36 PM UTC

goatinaboat wrote: post #63

Webdevs tend to suffer from an inferiority complex, that they are not considered “real” developers by the rest of the community. So they have responded by making the simple things they do monstrously complicated to try to prove something to the C++ guys, who simply don’t care, until they try to use the dumpster fire that is any modern website, that is. Then it has the opposite of the intended effect! Someone else men…

I might have agreed the inferiority complex existed in the early 2000s, but I don't see it anymore. Rather I think the negative thoughts go the other way, maybe not inferiority from non-webdevs, but jealousy. You can find n00bs who graduated a coding bootcamp and are now making a significantly larger amount of money doing webdev stuff than a bunch of middle aged guys working on legacy native applications who studied the arcane C++ arts and had to get a BS degree to even get an interview.

I'm playing contrarian here a bit, so excuse the unqualified language. It seems these days anyone who isn't a webdev in some capacity* is probably a dinosaur, inflexible, less well-paid, lacks understanding of complex distributed systems, and in any case is irrelevant in the modern conversations around development. Might makes right, after all, there are vastly more webdevs than non-webdevs and the most valuable software companies make their money from distributed systems interfaced with via web browsers... The notable exception is probably the group of native mobile application developers, but that's only become more and more webdev-like since both the iPhone and Android took over, rather than the reverse.

* Even being back-end only for a back-end whose only front-end is web-based. Yeah I am conflating webdev beyond the post's qualified "front-end developer". But the back-end webdev guys get up to the same overly complicated architecture-astronaut crap we like to complain about the front-end webdev guys getting up to. Don't let me go off on J2EE/JavaEE/Spring.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#260

Post by jimmaswell » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 9:36 PM UTC

lacampbell wrote: post #207

benbristow wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

jQuery isn't garbage as per se. It's a great library for directly querying & manipulating the DOM. Trying to make web applications with it is another story though. The lack of any state management is a nightmare, hence declarative frameworks/libraries such as React/Angular(JS)/Vue/Svelte etc. etc. came along.

The lack of any state management is a nightmare What makes the lack of state management a nightmare in the javascript world, but a complete non-issue when doing .NET or Qt apps? As someone who started with desktop apps and then moved into web dev, I never really understood why Javascript developers wanted a library to help them manage state.

The criticism makes no sense to me. jQuery is just there to make things nicer that you'd already be doing. It doesn't need to be an MVC framework.