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Why is modern web development so complicated?

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Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#521

Post by kaishiro »

reaperducer wrote: post #116
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.

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…

They absolutely can and will say it's all of those things - and for the most part the client will be none the wiser. It's practically the first step in relationship building for most agency pipelines.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#522

Post by woutr_be »

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…

My background is mainly frontend, but I'm well versed in backend as well. I've been actively advocating at my company to stop with this whole separate frontend and backend, and instead just return plain HTML and some basic JavaScript when needed.

In most of my personal projects I've been following this approach too, and I must say, I'm so much more productive. I don't find myself constantly switching between browser-, terminal and VS Code-windows. I don't have to do validation twice anymore, and know perfectly where all my data is coming from.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#523

Post by asdf21 »

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?

But there are tons of laravel sites, so there is a substantial profit motive to look for vulnerabilities in them.

It's like, outdated Wordpress sites get hacked all the time, but if I just threw together my own shitty blog in PHP and MySQL there's almost no chance it would, as no one (generally) is going to take the time to figure out hacks for just one site (especially for SMB).

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#524

Post by sadlion »

president wrote: post #77

As someone who hasn't done much web development in the last 10 years, it is mind-boggling how much you need to know in order to be a full-stack engineer these days. I tried to start a project a few months ago and just trying to decide on a technology was difficult. Npm, Gulp, Grunt, Webpack, React vs Vue vs Angular...I don't even know what half of these tools even do, why they're needed, not to mention the learning c…

Try a minimal set up with create react app with typescript and react testing library. Go through the react and typescript docs. Try Formik for easier forms next. Axios for HTTP requests. You can then venture into client side routing with React Router and finally may be Redux for complex state management.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#525

Post by dsego »

shams93 wrote: post #390
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 everyone assumes you have to build out an SPA and then you need a rest or graphql service behind that. It rapidly gets out of hand for the benefit of having a native like experience you wind up serving sites with 1 gig of us framework content per page.

Oh but then you add code splitting. And we've come full circle.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#526

Post by asdf21 »

rossdavidh wrote: post #265

The answer to "why is ___ so ___?", is very nearly always best when phrased as the question, "what was supposed to stop __ from __?" The answer is nearly always...nothing. There was nothing, technologically or organizationally, preventing web development from becoming so complicated, such that websites whose desired functionality would be satisfied by static html are now several meg of thousands of lines of javascrip…

I love this comment. So fucking dead-on in my experience.

Not to mention, saying any of those things would make you a "bad culture fit" and potentially break the "no assholes rule" if you argued the point.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#527

Post by gnaritas »

robertoandred wrote: post #514
dsego wrote: post #511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your first paragraph is exactly my point. Because in an SPA, you have to handle it in both places, not only on the server. That makes it twice as hard as an old fashioned server-side mvc page. > Data being "an sql query away" on the server is similar to being "an AJAX call away" on the client. This is a bit disingenuous, since sql calls in most back end languages are synchronous. Also an ajax call needs to update the…

Except no one is going to want to wait for a page refresh just to update a bit of data.

You don't have to refresh the page to rerender a part of it while still keeping the UI and all logic on the server. You don't need client side js view frameworks to make server side ajax apps.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#528

Post by asdf21 »

silexia wrote: post #365
rossdavidh wrote: post #265

The answer to "why is ___ so ___?", is very nearly always best when phrased as the question, "what was supposed to stop __ from __?" The answer is nearly always...nothing. There was nothing, technologically or organizationally, preventing web development from becoming so complicated, such that websites whose desired functionality would be satisfied by static html are now several meg of thousands of lines of javascrip…

I love your comment, but I think it does miss out on some important concepts. I used to think when I first started my company that I could just do every part of it far better than anyone else. I would push on my employees pretty hard and often denigrate their efforts. As the company is continued to grow, I now have 180 full-time employees. The reason I have all these people is that they can do enormously more work th…

The question is, are you auditing the final work being done by your "teams" and asking whether it could have been done more efficiently / simply?

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#529

Post by gnaritas »

benbristow wrote: post #283
jimmaswell wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For example, React isn’t an MVC framework. It’s a library. It allows rendering DOM declaratively based upon a state/props. jQuery just changes the DOM. It gets very difficult to keep the DOM in sync with the JavaScript backed data when there’s multiple moving parts.

So don't use javascript backed data; use your ajax calls to fetch new pieces of UI, not data. Keep your data on the server, send chunks of UI to the client rather than json.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#530

Post by unimployed »

james-mcelwain wrote: post #461
thaumaturgy wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's awesome that Google did that. This is the first I've heard of it. But: > The thing is that the overhead for this process really only makes sense at Google scale. The software industry is far larger than Google. If we want to claim that software is a discipline of engineering, we all need to have access to that kind of reference data, rather than trying to feel our way around in the dark in comment threads about…

I’d argue that the multiplicity of different programming languages and programming language paradigms suggests there likely isn't a teleological trajectory towards some single standard for programming. Part of this is because many systems are evolving, because business needs have human inputs and are not always "logical." At the edges where this human interaction happens, we expand the domain of programming to that o…

Physical constraints are more restrictive than information constraints. Physical constraints keep physical engineering from fragmenting into thousands of different but similar frameworks because the physical constraints rarely allow more than a few solutions to be competitive as best solutions. In information, the bounds/constraints are something more of a constructed popularity contest who the largest players are (Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, etc.) which carries as much or more weight than rigorously empirical comparisons.
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