Live data from Hacker News

Do we need a web API?

liaison.dev

31–40 of 107 posts

Re: Do we need a web API?

#32
Its good that expensive operations are explicit. Every now and then developers forget this and create garbage applications using frameworks that are set out in similar ways to this.

Don't hide the communication layer pls.

Re: Do we need a web API?

#35
post #7
post #4

>Sorry, this site requires JavaScript to be enabled. For a flat blog post? Like, seriously?

welcome to the web 2.0 cooming soon: web assemply web 3.0 which (I fear) might feel a lot like flash web pages from the early 00s. I hope I'm wrong.

Web 2.0 was like 15 years ago now. Web 2.0 was "supposed" to be about separation of style & content and gracefully degrading JavaScript.

I don't know want to call what we have now.

Re: Do we need a web API?

#36
post #27
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What ever happened to Meteor? It was flavour of the month a few years ago, with many a frontend dev ranting about how great it was. Now seems to be forgotten about.

Hassles with installing NPM packages (they used their own package manager (!)), it was incredibly heavyweight, baked in reliance on MongoDB, and a weird templating language caused a kind of death-by-a-thousand-cuts situation. Plus, React came out and blew Meteor out of the water.

One of the early Meteor developers, Evan You, went on to create Vue.js.

Re: Do we need a web API?

#37
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sympathetic to your position, but right now your comment doesn't carry much information. Why are they the right tool for the jobs? Which reasons are those?

Not to offer information, I'm just objecting to the stance they seem to make that : "Hey we're solving the 'API' requirement problem' when there really is no problem.. If your backend only communcates with an SPA and nothing else, then yup, this is a good tool for that job.

Actually this doesn't solve the core API challenges that SPAs have - versioning and compatibility. Clients will simply run outdated frontend code. Imho this is more trouble than worth as it will bring all the problems that we had with WSDL.

If i'd do a SPA that has 'node' backend, i'd just use typescript to model the API and you can have shared models and compile-time type safety.

Re: Do we need a web API?

#38
lol, coming from PHP, JSP and co, web APIs were the salvation.

Monoliths are a big problem and merging frontend and backend into each other only made it worse...

Re: Do we need a web API?

#39
post #7
post #4

>Sorry, this site requires JavaScript to be enabled. For a flat blog post? Like, seriously?

welcome to the web 2.0 cooming soon: web assemply web 3.0 which (I fear) might feel a lot like flash web pages from the early 00s. I hope I'm wrong.

Webasm doesn't enable anything new that couldn't already be done right now.

Re: Do we need a web API?

#40

isn't this a weak ass version of RPC/gRPC? https://grpc.io/ - and thank God gRPC never took off the way Google hoped, it was pure ego and politics like the majority of OSS projects these days (in the web world)

Can you elaborate on the "ego and politics" part?

I have a very personal history with gRPC
Post reply on HN