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

#421

Post by flukus » Mon, Apr 05, 2021, 2:26 AM UTC

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.

> Doing most of the work on the client instead of the server can often make scaling much easier.

Spitting out html from the server is incredibly easy to scale.

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

#422

Post by theonething » Mon, Apr 05, 2021, 2:27 AM UTC

mmcnl wrote: post #357

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. Tim…

> Time-to-market is greatly improved

I've experienced and have witnessed quite the opposite with SPAs

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

#423

Post by Havoc » Mon, Apr 05, 2021, 2:35 AM UTC

I mean the code / tech isn’t the issue really. A newsletter pop up a cookie banner an Adblock warning and inline flashing ads later you can’t even see the website. Experience sucks but that’s not due to bad tools

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

#424

Post by codethief » Mon, Apr 05, 2021, 2:35 AM UTC

mmcnl wrote: post #357

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. Tim…

> A website that got it completely right is the Dutch corona dashboard called "Coronadashboard" created by the Dutch government

Not sure what everyone else here is using but you're right, at least for me the website is running buttery smooth in both Firefox and Chrome and the code is of exceptional quality.

> 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).

I agree. I wrote my first lines of HTML & CSS almost 20 years ago and back then JavaScript dev was nightmare. People wouldn't even have been able to create an interactive website like the Coronadashboard. (Of course we're not talking about static websites here – these were already relatively easy back then.) Nowadays, JavaScript dev admittedly still is a nightmare but there are at least tools like TypeScript, Angular, React and so on that make things a bit less painful and allow experienced web developers to create exceptional frontends. I'm putting "experienced" here because the frameworks still come with some pitfalls and bad practices are still very common. (I can't believe how many tutorials about using forms with React still recommend updating the state and re-rendering the entire form upon every.single.keystroke.)

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

#425

Post by oliv__ » Mon, Apr 05, 2021, 2:37 AM UTC

camgunz wrote: post #388

JMTQp8lwXL wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If you backend team doesn't hear "I might have to make 1000 requests" and immediately think "oh that probably times out" and "oh do we have to re-batch that data" and immediately make a file upload endpoint, they're committing malpractice. Good grief.

"committing malpractice" is a very generous way of putting it.

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

#426

Post by perryizgr8 » Mon, Apr 05, 2021, 2:38 AM UTC

SilurianWenlock wrote: post #312

I only have experience with backend non web development, so my experience may not be worth much, but... Setting up a frontend web app with React (or Angular) is insanely hard to self teach and I would consider myself very good at self learning. Its hard to workout how to integrate React with Bootstrap and you often start to get problems you are not even sure how to fix. When you look at tutorials online, they all hav…

I can sympathise with this. I have no professional experience with web technologies. Whatever little I have done has been a hobby. And I can never learn anything "generally", the way I know how to make a C program.

Every react/angular tutorial throws a bunch of high concepts at me, and then a list of commands that will do some magic for me. I am unable to use this info to start my own web project and translate whatever is in my mind to the screen. Everything I have been able to do, has been by modifying existing examples/projects.

Like you, I consider myself to be a good self-learner. I was able to go through a couple of rust tutorials, and with generous consulting of the manual, I am able to write simple rust programs, and figure out how to do what I have in mind.

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

#427

Post by raspasov » Mon, Apr 05, 2021, 2:38 AM UTC

Avoid any flavor of 'the sky is falling'.

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

#428

Post by perryizgr8 » Mon, Apr 05, 2021, 2:42 AM UTC

simonw wrote: post #119

hyperpape wrote: post #116

I'm bothered by a lot of contemporary web development. Many things are implemented using far too much heavy JS code, and user experience suffers. I also think a lot of people drastically underestimate how much we get out of modern tools. In a followup tweet[1] and in this thread, antirez says that we haven't improved interaction in 20 years. Let's consider gmail, which is close enough to 20 years old. But at the time…

From defining the entire approach when it launched, Gmail has somehow turned into the single best argument /against/ SPAs. I dread opening it, because I know it's going to be slow to load and slow to use. I don't know how it went so wrong. Original Gmail was a revelation. Today it's sludge.

Try to use the basic html version. It is a masterpiece of UI design and is blazing fast. https://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=html&zy=h

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

#429

Post by codethief » Mon, Apr 05, 2021, 2:50 AM UTC

cutler wrote: post #420

One thing not mentioned often enough about SPAs is how complicated they make simple operations. In this component - https://gist.github.com/polydevuk/96d89642f114707b2f1a0cc316... - I have a select box for tzdata Regions (Europe, America etc.) and when a region is selected it populates a Locations menu beneath it (London, Paris etc.). Simple in jQuery or pure JS. In React, however, once a region and location has been…

It took me a while to understand your React example (or at least I hope I get it now). But I don't know… I agree that React has some pitfalls and lots of people don't get it right (especially forms!) but there are ways (clean ways, in fact) to solve this. It's not React's fault, though. Handling complicated state has always been hard and it's not exactly easier in jQuery or pure JS.

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

#430

Post by cutler » Mon, Apr 05, 2021, 2:56 AM UTC

codethief wrote: post #429

cutler wrote: post #420

One thing not mentioned often enough about SPAs is how complicated they make simple operations. In this component - https://gist.github.com/polydevuk/96d89642f114707b2f1a0cc316... - I have a select box for tzdata Regions (Europe, America etc.) and when a region is selected it populates a Locations menu beneath it (London, Paris etc.). Simple in jQuery or pure JS. In React, however, once a region and location has been…

It took me a while to understand your React example (or at least I hope I get it now). But I don't know… I agree that React has some pitfalls and lots of people don't get it right (especially forms!) but there are ways (clean ways, in fact) to solve this. It's not React's fault, though. Handling complicated state has always been hard and it's not exactly easier in jQuery or pure JS.

But in this case, which isn't atypical, it WAS easier in jQuery. Much easier. I had it working fine with jQuery but wanted to see if I could make it work with React. Here's the full component: https://gist.github.com/polydevuk/96d89642f114707b2f1a0cc316...