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If Not SPAs, What?

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Re: If Not SPAs, What?

#281

Post by BossingAround »

TacoSteemers wrote: post #272
randomsearch wrote: post #261

Author seems to think the goal of SPAs was to simplify web dev, but it’s actually to allow you to build fully featured, highly interactive, apps in a browser. What the author is really getting at, I would guess, is that front end dev is awful, due to this weird combination of the Blub issue and a historical trajectory that has caused many problems. The blub issues is mostly simple enough to pin down. Experienced prog…

> not to defend the Java ecosystem, but it does get some things right, or more right than others Out of curiosity, as a Java enthusiast, I was wondering if you could give examples of what you feel is wrong? In my HN browsing I find Java is rarely actually discussed here, though often dismissed. I don't know why.

> In my HN browsing I find Java is rarely actually discussed here, though often dismissed. I don't know why.

Personally, I feel like Java is not really as hated as some people make it out to be. It's a stable language that very few people choose for their "cool side project". At the same time, it has excellent tooling, mature and prod-ready open source frameworks, and backing of some giant companies.

This is not to say that Java is perfect. I think most dissatisfaction comes from students or junior people who are baffled by the complexity of Maven/Gradle configurations, strict project structure (where a class can be 10 directories deep), and Java's insistence on boilerplate (which is often challenged by new Java releases. Those, however, are quite rare in production; I'm starting to see Java 11 here and there but the majority of projects I've seen run 1.8).

Re: If Not SPAs, What?

#282

Post by can3p »

SPAs obviously have some positive sides, i.e. state management, but that goes with a price of increasing complexity, especially if server-side rendering is required.

In majority of cases, especially when building tools like back offices it's not what you want, you just want to be able to render forms, tables and save them in a convenient way.

I've found turbolinks + simulus.js combo to work surprisingly well. Actually, I use the only one stimulus.js controller in majority of cases - one that makes an ajax request and reloads the page (with the help of turbolinks) on success. If page load time is fast enough, the use experience is the same as if you would change the dom with js manually. Of course the requirement is that reloaded page reflects the changes.

Other stimulus.js controllers are there for the cases that don't fit into aforementioned pattern. That sounds primitive but can take you a really long way without turning your js into a a monster.

In addition to that you don't need to care about the routing, html validation just works, you can wrap existing html components and even inject react apps here and there if you really need to.

[EDIT] Forgot to say - this approach does not force any language or architecture on the server-side

Re: If Not SPAs, What?

#283

Post by BossingAround »

grandinj wrote: post #280
rytill wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, Java’s ties with Oracle and the nightmare stories about complicated `MetaAbstractBaseClassFactoryClassFactory` are why I seek alternatives, or would be dismissive.

Just noting that the abstraction stuff is mostly a consequence of the CORBA-derived, over-engineered "Enterprise Java" space, and provided you stay out of that tar-pit, and choose your libraries/dependencies wisely, Java is really nice to work with. Even if you need to implement some kind of "Enterprise Java" app, you can do so with much better libraries and tools than back then, that do not suffer from the excessive…

I still see factories on a daily basis. They are a useful design pattern that is utilized in Java.

My anecdotal evidence is that I have never seen the over-engineered "Enterprise Java horrors" OP is talking about despite working in the Java EE (now Jakarta EE) space.

I suspect it's a story from the times of J2EE, or something similar.

Re: If Not SPAs, What?

#284

Post by mucsun »

rytill wrote: post #278
TacoSteemers wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> not to defend the Java ecosystem, but it does get some things right, or more right than others Out of curiosity, as a Java enthusiast, I was wondering if you could give examples of what you feel is wrong? In my HN browsing I find Java is rarely actually discussed here, though often dismissed. I don't know why.

For me, Java’s ties with Oracle and the nightmare stories about complicated `MetaAbstractBaseClassFactoryClassFactory` are why I seek alternatives, or would be dismissive.

It's not Javas fault it got bought by Oracle (and I don't agree that is is bad, as Oracle advanced it quite).

And I do like 'MetaAbstractBaseClassFactoryClassFactory' type names because that allows me in an application with hundreds if not thousands of classes to find the class I'm looking for very fast by just typing a few keywords into my IDE.

Re: If Not SPAs, What?

#285

Post by doctor_eval »

avereveard wrote: post #265
switz wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> developing became more and more inefficient Anecdotally I find the opposite to be true. I've been writing frontend code for over a decade, but I've never moved faster and wrote less buggy code than now. Is that because I've become a better developer? Sure, a little bit. But by and large, I don't believe that ultimately is the reason. I think it's the maturity in the technology. My growth as a programmer is hardly l…

> Frontend tooling has never been better than it is today. eh. Swing in its golden age run circle around what we have now. Granted it's old tech now that we settled for in-browser delivery, but still: - look and feels could do theming you can only dream of with css variables/scss - serialize and restore gui states partially or whole, including listeners - value binding systems vue can only dream of - native scrollers…

Not to be mean, but I worked with Swing for ten years and it was absolute crap. Constantly dealing with resizing “collapsars”, GBLs, poor visual compatibility with the host OS, a fragile threading model and piles and piles of unfixed bugs and glitches was a nightmare. It might have worked if you had a specific end user environment but it was a PITA for anything else, and deployment was even harder.

There are a few things I definitely miss from my 20 years as a Java dev, but the half assed and under funded Swing UI is not among them.

Give me HTML+CSS+JS any time.

Re: If Not SPAs, What?

#286

Post by richeyryan »

jamil7 wrote: post #244
Merad wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm asking because in all the projects I've been involved with, consuming the backend API always felt like a mess with lots of reinventing the wheel (poorly) and duplication of code. I can't believe in 2020 there's not some kind of library I can call that will give me my backend resources as JSON and transparently handle all the caching, pagination, error handling (translate error responses to exceptions), etc and…

Haven’t used it but aren’t there things that can connect to a swagger API spec and do some of the heavy lifting for you? I agree that the network layer in frontend is tedious to implement, things like GraphQL and Apollo attempt raise the abstraction level. What I would really like to see is something even more abstracted, e.g a wrapper around indexdb you can write to that syncs periodically over websockets to your se…

It seems that you are describing pouchdb: https://pouchdb.com/

Re: If Not SPAs, What?

#287

Post by jamil7 »

richeyryan wrote: post #286
jamil7 wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haven’t used it but aren’t there things that can connect to a swagger API spec and do some of the heavy lifting for you? I agree that the network layer in frontend is tedious to implement, things like GraphQL and Apollo attempt raise the abstraction level. What I would really like to see is something even more abstracted, e.g a wrapper around indexdb you can write to that syncs periodically over websockets to your se…

It seems that you are describing pouchdb: https://pouchdb.com/

You're right Pouch completely slipped my mind, it's a great solution. But what about something more generic on the backend that wasn't database specfic, some sync engine you could put in front of whatever database you wanted. Can you do something like this with Pouch?

Re: If Not SPAs, What?

#288

Post by cblconfederate »

buzzerbetrayed wrote: post #219
cblconfederate wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not possible for SPAs outside localhost. Every single SPA i know is clunky, including gmail which is probably one of the most barebones. The lack of visual indication that something is happening or downloading alone is infuriating with SPAs. Most of them reinvent the browser in a very poor substitute that invariably fails to both be practical , and to mimic a native mobile app (i think the latter is the reason…

SPAs are like CGI.. you only notice it when it is bad. I can assure you, you use many SPAs that are not slow and clunky, you just don't realize they are SPAs

I notice all of them , 100% of the time. Twitter has a fairly good one, but even that s very clunky. I'm not saying they are all slow, but they are clunky, jumpy and unpredictable, which in many ways is worse than a webpage like HN that is 100% consistent, but sometimes times out. Predictability for me is more important than pay-it-later responsiveness. E.g. when i press the Pay button i 'm OK with waiting 20 seconds for the payment to process. What's unacceptable is the button standing still, not doing anything until a few seconds later, at which time i ve pressed it 10 times.

Re: If Not SPAs, What?

#289

Post by sumedh »

austincheney wrote: post #277
sumedh wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No, it doesn’t take that much skill. That is a pretty bold statement to make.

Not at all. It would only be a bold statement if it weren't so immediately validated in practice. A developer can write code or they can't.

> A developer can write code or they can't.

Uhh that is not how it works. I can write code but if you tell me go and write in assembly or C, I cant because I think its outside my circle of competence.

Maybe you find SPA's easy others dont.

Re: If Not SPAs, What?

#290

Post by ratww »

TacoSteemers wrote: post #272
randomsearch wrote: post #261

Author seems to think the goal of SPAs was to simplify web dev, but it’s actually to allow you to build fully featured, highly interactive, apps in a browser. What the author is really getting at, I would guess, is that front end dev is awful, due to this weird combination of the Blub issue and a historical trajectory that has caused many problems. The blub issues is mostly simple enough to pin down. Experienced prog…

> not to defend the Java ecosystem, but it does get some things right, or more right than others Out of curiosity, as a Java enthusiast, I was wondering if you could give examples of what you feel is wrong? In my HN browsing I find Java is rarely actually discussed here, though often dismissed. I don't know why.

My impression is that the design of Java the language, plus its runtime, are appreciated even by the harshest critics.

However the culture around complex frameworks and over-engineering is what most people really dislike about it.

IMO pretty much all the advantages touted by Java proponents (such as: good language design, easy of use by heterogenous teams, speed, etc) are correct, but are negated by a large part of the culture and ecosystem. The memes about humongous class names and 200-method stack traces are true when you use the popular frameworks and techniques.

Of course there are exceptions to this and this can creep into other languages too, of course.

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