I can only think that modern front end development has failed • Hacker News Board

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

#351

Post by Matrixik » Sun, Apr 04, 2021, 8:34 PM UTC

selfmodruntime wrote: post #118

caseymarquis wrote: post #25

I'd like to add a bit more nuance. Modern frontend development provides many opportunities for failure. These failures often make their way into production. I, personally, get great results with modern FE development. My users are happy. I am happy. It's all very successful. All the defenders of modern FE development will likely chime in with the same sentiment. I also get great results with C, which arguably provide…

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…

They are fast only on fast and expensive user equipment:

https://infrequently.org/2021/03/the-performance-inequality-...

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

#352

Post by lolc » Sun, Apr 04, 2021, 8:43 PM UTC

daniellarusso wrote: post #46

okareaman wrote: post #14

I recently lost my internet provider, so while I wait for a new one I'm tethering from my phone. The Verizon unlimited data plan actually throttles me to modem speed, about 56k, so it's actually not unlimited. Anyway, it's been interesting to judge various websites by how fast they load at that speed. Hacker News comes right up. Twitter is acceptable. Facebook is terrible and often does not even load at all. The same…

This came up with my remote team recently. A coworker and myself had the worst internet speeds in the company, but he recently got FTTH. I went to replicate a bug, by clicking on a button quickly and excessively, and was able to add 5 duplicate entries into the DB. The frontend dev could not replicate it until I suggested using the Chrome dev tools to simulate a slower connection. I have Frontier DSL.

I remember tracking down corrupt entries in our DB. It was mostly one user introducing the inconsistencies. Turns out he would double-click on every button, and the browser would happily send-abort-send two requests every time. Sometimes these would race on the server.

We implemented disable-on-submit after that, and the inconsistencies went away. Other people would click again when the response didn't come fast enough, but that was rare to lead to corruption. Probably when their connection was lagging, they would click multiple times in frustration. But that one guy provoked enough destruction to make us notice and fix it for everybody!

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

#353

Post by JNRowe » Sun, Apr 04, 2021, 8:46 PM UTC

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #185

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…

I am going to :+1: the UK census site - built on code developed by the gov.UK digital service, it has been apparently bulletproof at taking 20 million plus individual households through a moderately complex survey. sometimes it can be done right. And it uses a framework :-)

Yeah, I was impressed enough to fill out the feedback form at the end. It is probably the first time I've used a feedback form for compliments in my life.

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

#354

Post by slowmovintarget » Sun, Apr 04, 2021, 8:49 PM UTC

rabuse wrote: post #242

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…

I honestly hate SPA's. They're not necessary in almost every single use-case, yet everybody is shifting their shit into one.

Why SPAs? They're good when you develop capabilities API-first. When we build features, we follow an approach of making the feature possible (customer support can exercise the feature with PostMan or cURL) then making it friendly with a UI.

There will be some tweaks and changes to the API to support the UI, but it's rarely drastic, and it ensures that every single capability we build out can be exercised by some other kind of program somewhere.

If you're building components of a larger system (which we do), SPAs and web components atop back-end APIs make sense. If you're building a one-off fill-out form kind of application... No those don't make sense. You don't even need JavaScript for those, if you degrade into just HTML + CSS for users that have shut off JS.

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

#355

Post by wilsonfiifi » Sun, Apr 04, 2021, 8:52 PM UTC

devit wrote: post #195

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am going to :+1: the UK census site - built on code developed by the gov.UK digital service, it has been apparently bulletproof at taking 20 million plus individual households through a moderately complex survey. sometimes it can be done right. And it uses a framework :-)

Which framework?

Wagtail

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

#356

Post by josephg » Sun, Apr 04, 2021, 8:57 PM UTC

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…

The argument to make to the backend team is a bit nuanced but it’s this: Generally each PUT/POST sent to the backend should have atomic semantics. If there’s some user action (like uploading a CSV) that should entirely succeed or entirely fail, you want to send it in a single HTTP request. If it matters that it happens exactly once (like submitting a forum post), then adding a nonce of some sort is a good idea too - just in case the request succeeds but the response gets dropped and the user retries the action.

It’s often tempting to model URLs like database entries and send multiple requests to the server to model updating many records based on one action. That’s a mistake - have the client name the action, send one http request, and execute it in a single database transaction in the backend if you need to. This approach is way more reliable, debuggable and consistent. This sort of thing is absolutely the backend’s responsibility.

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

#357

Post by mmcnl » Sun, Apr 04, 2021, 9:00 PM UTC

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…

This is a very simplistic characterization of what's happening.

First of all, for all the broken websites there are also a lot of websites that are not broken at all. It's also very easy to make a broken website using a completely server-side rendered website, and that actually happens often enough.

Second, SPA's decouple frontend and backend in a very strict way, which can bring enormous organizational benefits. Time-to-market is greatly improved, etc.

This whole "frontend vs backend" dialogue is basically white noise that completely misses the point. Use SPA or not, whatever, in the end it's just a tool to get the job done. Both are prone to errors when handled improperly.

A website that got it completely right is the Dutch corona dashboard called "Coronadashboard" created by the Dutch government: https://coronadashboard.rijksoverheid.nl. It's blazingly fast, extremely well-designed, looks great and the code is of exceptional quality. Also it's open-source, have a look at the code: https://github.com/minvws/nl-covid19-data-dashboard/.

The dashboard is completely written in Javascript. I truly believe a website with of such high quality would not be possible without frameworks such as React or Next.js (or whatever other framework and their respective tooling has to offer).

Closing note: let's try learn more from the websites that got it right than the ones that have failed. It's so easy to be critical, it's much harder to give some praise.

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

#358

Post by tffgg » Sun, Apr 04, 2021, 9:10 PM UTC

slt2021 wrote: post #150

tffgg wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you want server side rendering? As a user it's painful if you have to wait after each click

is it painful for you to click on HN? I find this website rapid fast. Also because you dont have long running JS processes the RAM consumption is low and everything feels very quick, unlike most SPA garbage

Yeah, I kinda wish clicks would respond instantly

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

#359

Post by sosborn » Sun, Apr 04, 2021, 9:28 PM UTC

coldtea wrote: post #286

sosborn wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing about music is that "more complex chords, more harmonies, more timbral variety, etc..." doesn't say anything about whether or not the music is better. It's a silly pursuit anyway given that music is a subjective experience.

That's neither here, nor there. This is not about whether or not this or that particular song is better, is the top (most listened/streamed/talked about) music in general losing variety in all these aspects (harmony, melody, timbre, lyrics, genres, dynamics, etc). That's not subjective, that's objective, and has been measured to get worse. The "subjective experience" could be good, the same way people can prefer McDo…

Again, “worse” is subjective.

Even saying someone has “shit taste” is subjective.

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

#360

Post by danjac » Sun, Apr 04, 2021, 9:32 PM UTC

tazjin wrote: post #47

HN seems to be pretty split on this issue. I concur with the linked tweet. Using the web beyond very simple pages like HN feels like wading through garbage. Everything is slow, laggy, loads ridiculous amounts of stuff (I live in a country where traffic is very expensive at the moment, so this becomes more noticeable). Things are also flaky and need reloading whenever they get into broken states. The only way I use th…

I built a side project recently using Django/Hotwire. There's some JS, sure, but it's used where appropriate (media API stuff basically). Lighthouse gives 100% accessibility and best practices scores and performance comes in at over 90% on a good day, with performance issues mostly fixed with some database indexing and caching here and there (it runs on a single shoestring Digital Ocean droplet, so it's never going to be super fast or scalable without a bigger budget, but for the small traffic it gets it's fine). I feel I can reason about how it all works in my head, and fix bugs and add features quite easily. It was fun to build, and I was able to focus on interesting problems.

At the back of my mind is the feeling that somehow I'm doing it all wrong, and it should use a proper JS frontend framework like React or Vue that communicates with the backend with a proper REST API or better yet, GraphQL. I realize it's probably not the kind of project I should use to show off on my resume and that many will just consider it old school. At the same time though it does feel that maybe the industry took a wrong turn when it went all-in on SPAs.