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I can only think that modern front end development has failed

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Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed

#341

Post by sitkack »

JMTQp8lwXL wrote: post #204
jefftk wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doing most of the work on the client instead of the server can often make scaling much easier. I read your comment as assuming that the division between the server's job and the client's job is fixed, but as the browser has become more powerful many things have moved to the client.

Doing the work on the client can sometimes be the right choice, but I'll share a converse point. I was tasked with implementing a bulk record upload feature. The UI was to accept up a CSV file with up to 1 million records. The API provided by the backend team accept max 1,000 records in JSON. So now I have to convert CSV, for which there's no official specification, to JSON, and then make (up to) 1,000 HTTP requests…

Your backend devs are shirking responsibility, the front end shouldn't prep data, it should handle input and do rendering.

Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed

#342

Post by p1mrx »

bit_logic wrote: post #156

What upsets and concerns me the most is when I see poorly developed SPA on really important sites. For example, government service application websites. If reddit or nytimes has a bloated, intermittently failing SPA site, that's an annoyance. When it's a form to apply for unemployment, ACA health care, DMV, or other critical services, it's a critical failure. Especially since these services are most often used by exa…

SPA = single-page application

Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed

#345

Post by pnt12 »

iambateman wrote: post #109

Not so fast. Front end development is in fantastic shape for an industry that’s 25 years old. In a quarter century, we’ve participated in reshaping how billions of people spend their free time and get their work done, seen the rise of social giants, endured the creation of millions of mediocre small business sites, learned to build apps, and taught millions to code in the process. Now, some of our current development…

It's an industry with established UX guidelines defined 20 years ago which are mostly ignored today. Slow, inconsistent and confusing interfaces seem to be the norm, not the exception.

There were some revolutions, like responsive design, but all the rest feels very shallow compared to the bad UX experienced in so many applications and websites.

Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed

#346

Post by selfmodruntime »

Drew_ wrote: post #155
selfmodruntime wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love modern frontend development. I can build apps that scale easily to hundreds of thousands of users. They are fast where they need to be fast, and building components means complexity lives only where it's needed. Static parts are rendered statically, dynamic parts are rendered dynamically. I can write all code for the entire stack in Javascript. The entire workflow is streamlined in a simple way (webpack really…

Got to agree with everything but > Debugging modern front-end code is a breeze Is still hit or miss every once and while depending on the use case. For example debugging service workers is still a bit of a nightmare. And I've also had some issues debugging a chrome extension written with Vue CLI + the browser extension plugin.

I'd argue service workers are a pretty rare thing to debug

Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed

#347

Post by jiofih »

Drew_ wrote: post #329
jiofih wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

React never claimed performance, and the virtual DOM is quite wasteful. Any direct manipulation library will perform better. Plus, it’s dishonest to look at react core size. react-dom, which is absolutely required, is 40KB minified AND compressed. Plus the usual plugins to handle icons, SVG, animations, and on on. A base React application easily crosses the 200KB gzipped mark.

> React never claimed performance, and the virtual DOM is quite wasteful. Any direct manipulation library will perform better. React's performance (in large part because of it's virtual DOM) over Angular was a common benefit cited in it's rise to fame. Indeed no one ever claimed React was somehow faster than the document API (or even JQuery) and that isn't what I'm saying either. Whether or not you think the virtual…

The mating call of all react devs - “but what about the images”. Who said a 100KB hero image was a good idea either? It doesn’t excuse dropping a 1MB (when executed) bomb of JavaScript to deliver a blog post and making mobile and low speed users suffer.

It’s also established that byte per byte, JS is way more costly to download, parse and execute than images, the comparison itself is dumb.

Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed

#348

Post by tmwed »

what a dramatic and ridiculous statement. i suppose you could say i have a vested interest in holding an opinion like that. however the dude that posted that tweet is in the tech space, therefore (imo) excludes him from being “just a user of the internet”. furthermore, REAL USER demands and expectations increased from native mobile app usage, so of course the complexity of pages/apps on the web have followed suit.

Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed

#349

Post by [deleted] »

jefftk wrote: post #148
ocimbote wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> build apps that scale easily to hundreds of thousands of users I don't understand this. Frontend dev is about writing a portable software to run on as many runtimes as there are users. There is literally nothing to prevent any frontend software, good or bad, to "scale", because scaling in terms of users is nonsical for frontend dev (unless you consider browser compatibility as scaling, to which statement I'm orthog…

Doing most of the work on the client instead of the server can often make scaling much easier. I read your comment as assuming that the division between the server's job and the client's job is fixed, but as the browser has become more powerful many things have moved to the client.

[deleted]

Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed

#350

Post by throwawayboise »

pas wrote: post #294
tomc1985 wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do these things even need to be an SPA? What function does that serve when the standardized and infinitely more compatible form-with-a-bit-of-javascript approach works just as well if not better? I work on one such project and it absolutely drives me nuts -- it's a rails app, but the customer front-end (which is literally just a form to fill out) is a React SPA. There is nothing there that couldn't be done with T…

Because that's the mainstream, that's what's easy to procure, hire for, negotiate with vendors, that's the default, the preferred, the future proof, the supported. And the tech doesn't really matter. I hate React with a passion, because Angular is so much more sane - in my experience. But it's fine. It's mature, it can be made to perform completely well. The tech doesn't really matter. The people doesn't matter eithe…

> the future proof

No, not that.

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