Data fetching on the web still sucks

[0] https://hexdocs.pm/phoenix/channels.html

One of the many reasons I love nuxt/Vue.

From how I read it, this the post is not specifically about JS and a discussion of the specific technologies mentioned but rather concerned with the following very general situation:

1. There's a user sitting in front of a browser.

2. There's a backend server providing data and points of interaction with that data.

I think the central point of the post now is that we don't have a satisfying technical solution for this situation.

Let's take a look at one of the points you mentioned. Maybe you might find there's actually some valid points in the post and give it a more favourable reread.

> UX when fetching data: What does that have to do with any of the above?

Here, the author of the post writes: "It’s a big burden for engineers to have to manually add loading spinners and error states, and engineers often forget."

I think it's more or less clear how you could implement this using only plain vanilla js. Cumbersome but doable: A very manual, imperative process.

Now let's envision a technology from a possible future:

    const twitterFeed = createMagicDataSource("https://twitter.com/...")

    const feedComponent = magicRendererComponent(twitterFeed, state => /* HTML like declarative description of the visuals */)

* state gets automatically loaded when the first instance of the component is created

* updates are automatically visualized in the client based on the internals of the declaration in the renderer

* you don't have to specify if the updates are done by polling, websockets or whatever: the two magic methods figure this out by themselves.

* you don't have to specify how the data is fetched in the first place. giving the a URI to the `createMagicDataSource` function is enough.

* additional instances of the component don't fetch the data again

* updates are efficient: the sync method only exchanges exactly the data required, only the minimal visual updates are performed

* marking feeds as "seen" by the user is also done by magic and syncs across devices (same for other non-ephemeral ui state).

Now: And I'm sure you'd agree that we are not there yet technologically. But I hope you agree that this would be really nice.

...yes; that is, in fact, the conceptual dichotomy in solutions to essentially-complex problems. Either someone else solves them for you, or you have to solve them yourself.

I mean, yes, there is a part of the solution-space in-between these two extremes — a point where there's a batteries-included thing that someone else built but then gives away for free, perhaps as an open-source project you just have to run on your own infra. So it's mostly solved for you, and then you just do a little bit to "get the solution running" for your use-case. That point in solution-space is conspicuously absent for web data sync.

But, in domains with essential complexity, that middle-ground part of the solution-space is usually conspicuously absent. Because it takes continuous dedicated effort (i.e. labor; capital expenditure) to solve the complex problem in a cleanly-abstracted way. And it's very rare that anyone's going to go to the effort, unless they expect a return on their labor investment (by e.g. keeping the solution proprietary, and building a SaaS business around it.)