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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

#391

Post by seandoe »

uncledave wrote: post #233
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…

Yes definitely. I was surprised recently as I had to fill in a massive form based site for UK NHS mental health survey stuff. The site appeared as a flat background old style early 2000’s sort of thing with bits of comic sans in it. I nearly died when I first saw it expecting a shit show. But it turned out to be responsive and fast. It worked perfectly from end to end and had little to no JavaScript. It was by far th…

> early 2000’s sort of thing

Right. It probably IS an old site and they've had years to iron-out bugs.

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

#392

Post by vgeek »

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…

If not that, maybe try PdaNet. It is $10-15 for a license and it can mask that you're tethering through a tunnel from desktop->phone, so everything gets counted as mobile data instead of hotspot data.

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

#394

Post by zamadatix »

chubot wrote: post #305
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…

Yeah what's weird is that there's is an entire generation of developers who think of SPA as the default. They think that server side is slower because you have to send down more data, or you have to wait for the server to generate HTML. Quite the contrary, it's slower to send down 1 MB or 10 MB of JavaScript to render a page, than to simply send down a 100 KB HTML page. Even if you need some JS also, browsers know ho…

I've always taken "server side is slower" to mean "slower to host" in context of web pages. Sure it may blow chunks to parse 10 MB of JS to click a button and leave on the client side but that's 10 MB of static JS served via dirt cheap anycast style CDN and it doesn't matter if you have 1 client or 100,000 clients you could host it on a single server's worth of CDN which doesn't have to worry about any client state ever (and for the tiny percentage of client state you do need to manage it might be hosted on a much smaller solution that handles just that logic).

I'm more of the classic take that the "problem" is performance has continued to grow meaning we get more stuff made faster but the tradeoff is it runs at the same speed. Client side or server side there is no reason the app needs 10 MB of JS logic to do its job it just made it quicker and easier to deploy to have it use 10 MB of JS logic. For some things like required government services this is a real problem but for most things this is just reality - how fast a piece of software is isn't the only benchmark software is made against, often not even in the top 3 things it's checked against.

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

#395

Post by tyingq »

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.

I really believe it's a case of resume driven development. I'm sure there are counter-examples, but the whole move to SPAs, from my vantage point, has been driven by tech people and not leaders. Self-inflicted.

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

#396

Post by austincheney »

chubot wrote: post #305
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…

Yeah what's weird is that there's is an entire generation of developers who think of SPA as the default. They think that server side is slower because you have to send down more data, or you have to wait for the server to generate HTML. Quite the contrary, it's slower to send down 1 MB or 10 MB of JavaScript to render a page, than to simply send down a 100 KB HTML page. Even if you need some JS also, browsers know ho…

Take away React, Vue, Angular, or similar away from most current front end developers and there is panic. When I say panic I mean full insanity panic like abandoning the profession or completely going postal.

——

A simple checklist to provide superior front end applications:

* Don’t use this. You (general hypothetical you) probably don’t realize how easily you can live without it only because you have never tried. Doing so will dramatically shrink and untangle your spaghetti code.

* Don’t use addEventListener for assigning events. That method was added around the time of ES5 to minimize disruption so that marketers could add a bunch of advertising, spyware, and metric nonsense everywhere more easily without asking permission from developers. That method complicated code management, is potentially point of memory leaks, and performs more slowly.

* Don’t use querySelectors. They are a crutch popularized by the sizzle utility of jQuery. These are super epic slow and limit the creative expression of your developers because there is so much they can’t do compared to other means of accessing the DOM.

I now add ESLint rules to my code to automate enforcement of that tiny checklist.

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

#399

Post by brundolf »

csmiller wrote: post #49
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…

I believe Twitter uses React? Although it’s possible that Twitter successfully served you Twitter-Lite while FB may have mistakenly sent the full version.

I think Twitter does some aggressive PWA-style caching

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

#400

Post by pm »

austincheney wrote: post #396
chubot wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah what's weird is that there's is an entire generation of developers who think of SPA as the default. They think that server side is slower because you have to send down more data, or you have to wait for the server to generate HTML. Quite the contrary, it's slower to send down 1 MB or 10 MB of JavaScript to render a page, than to simply send down a 100 KB HTML page. Even if you need some JS also, browsers know ho…

Take away React, Vue, Angular, or similar away from most current front end developers and there is panic. When I say panic I mean full insanity panic like abandoning the profession or completely going postal. —— A simple checklist to provide superior front end applications: * Don’t use this . You (general hypothetical you) probably don’t realize how easily you can live without it only because you have never tried. Do…

What do you use instead of these constructs?
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