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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

#501

Post by vagrantJin »

toss1 wrote: post #491
vagrantJin wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I cant agree more. I could cry. Ive been on a crusade for over a year to scale back diddly js frameworks because 'scale'. Ive heard many bullshit excuses before but sacrificing performance and reliability for being "scalabable" is beyond mind boggling. It gives me a panic attack when medium articles are the chief architect and purveyors of software development truths. I live and work in developing countries and could…

Yup, all these rapid-dev frameworks and tools may be fantastic for rapidly developing and refining a prototype. But that is just the beginning of the process, the job is barely half done. The devs must then focus on exactly what is needed in the code to refactor and strip out every unnecessary instruction and byte of download. Page load times and refresh times that are more than 3-digit milliseconds rapidly become un…

Your sarcasm is well and truly appreciated but misplaced.

The idea is that these libs and framework make an honest attempt at making web apps. Also well intentioned but wide off the mark. Most people access the internet through mobile phones[1] with dodgy broadband connectivity, hence don't need an app running inside another app - do you understand the redundancy and the pitfalls of janky, horrible UIs for the marginal performance improvement? Or the famous It doesn't reload the whole page...very few people actually care about.

If you are building the next instagram, go right ahead and use bleeding edge js frameworks, but not every site/blog needs to be an app.

[1] https://gs.statcounter.com/platform-market-share/desktop-mob...

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

#502

Post by mmcnl »

gls2ro wrote: post #446
mmcnl wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Can you please clarify this? If you are referring to a web app time to market I mostly see otherwise. Here is an example: create a form to edit user settings. In Rails/Django it is pretty simple straightforward. But if you go React then you have an API and a component in React and have to think about routes and security of API and validations on both FE and BE. There are advantage…

Backend and frontend are different species and require different skillsets. It's much easier to scale from an organizational perspective using SPA's, especially in companies where software is not the core product (think non-tech Fortune 500).

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

#503

Post by xtracto »

alerighi wrote: post #367
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…

There are many reasons why having SPA and rendering your site on the client is a bad idea. First, you are basically breaking the concept of the web, a collection of documents, not a collection of code that must be executed to get a document. That has many bad effects. Browsing is slower, you have to download the code of the whole application and wait for it to execute other API calls to the server before the page is…

>First, you are basically breaking the concept of the web, a collection of documents, not a collection of code that must be executed to get a document

I think this ship has sailed a long time ago. Nevertheless, I still think that current SPA frameworks are overblown. I am partial to Javascript/HTML + WebComponents. However, I put the blame into the influx of "coderz" that in the last 10 years have arrived to do FrontEnd development.

It is very similar to the use of thick frameworks in the backend (LoopBack, Ruby on Rails, etc): There's people who do not have a clue about what they are doing but they still build SPA websites by changing some code here and there after an "npm create-react-app-shopping-cart" script.

I've interviewed hundreds of "Frontend Developers" and for the majority of them, once you start entering into the concepts of HTTP headers, why do we have CSS? why do we use font-icons and image sprites, CDN, JavaScript closures, JavaScript this/that issues, let/var differences, etc, they stare me with blank eyes.

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

#504

Post by xtracto »

bri3d wrote: post #296
criddell wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If ECMAScript, HTML, and the DOM didn't exist and you were asked to create a specification for applications where the client UI is remote, possibly very resource constrained with a connection to the back end that may be slow and only mostly reliable, what would you invent? Is there a better model already out there that isn't used because Javascript + HTML has sucked all of the oxygen out of the room?

Even Flex and ActionScript were better in many ways than the DOM. My big problem with web application (in a true application sense - not things that are just hypertext and shouldn't be applications at all!) development is that the DOM+CSS model is not made for rich UI experiences. Basic paradigms from desktop applications like spreadsheet cell selection, draggable cards (think Vizio/UML), modals, and MDI / multi-docu…

As a language, ActionScript 3 was actually pretty good.

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

#505

Post by xyzelement »

johnfn wrote: post #497
xyzelement wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think their analogy may still hold. My mom claims her cooking is better than the restaurants (arguable) but she's not operating under the constraints of cooking at the variety, consistency and speed that my local diner does. The diner needs to be able to provide hundreds of dishes on short order including on days when the main chef is out. So maybe my mom's once-in-a-while pot of chilly is great but she couldn't ru…

Thanks, this was exactly the thrust of my analogy. I appreciate it when it lands for at least one person (though perhaps I could be a bit more precise in my writing)

You're welcome! I rely on analogies a lot and I find them helpful. Turns out many others think differently and don't find analogies an inherently helpful way to think. They get confused and get caught in details ("but chilly is spicy and that's good, but you don't want spicy code so... what?") It's just cool to see how many thinking models there are out there.

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

#506

Post by minusf »

vsareto wrote: post #304
q-big wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Any framework you're not familiar with will feel like this. This isn't something unique to frontend frameworks. But the frameworks get out of fashion faster than you can obtain deep knowledge of them.

This is starting to no longer be true. We've held Angular/React in the top spots for a while now. Vue is probably next in line. However, both front-end and back-end are substantial enough now and have enough frameworks and environments that it's really hard to do well at both. I'd much prefer more specialization, which would hopefully lead to higher quality.

i am not sure there are true top spots in the javascript world.

in my circles more and more people look at svelte to try to get away from frameworks altogether.

new tooling is always just around the corner: there is a webpack killer annonced every couple of months.

this very site is full articles "why we switched from/to react", etc.

in the javascript community "stability" is anything with a bit less churn than the bleeding edge. i think it will result in a massive burnout for a whole generation of developers.

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

#507

Post by jlokier »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #411
jlokier wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not quite bulletproof. I found a couple of bugs while using it. At the end, just before submission it showed the completed sections, and you could look at each section to see a tidy summary of the answers provided. Except for the section 1, where doing that jumped to the last of the section's questions instead. I wanted to see one of the answers I had given in the section 1 to check before committing, and due to the…

Consider filing a bug report: https://census.gov.uk/en/web-form/

Thanks. I already did so via the feedback form at the end.

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

#508

Post by busymom0 »

maeil wrote: post #487
busymom0 wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imo Reddit ruined their site on purpose as that makes users go to the app instead which adblockers have a hard time blocking ads on (unless you have pi hole setup). They also added a ton of extra wasted space to make users scroll longer and thus stuff more ads in and increase user times.

This isn't an opinion, this is a proven fact given that Reddit blocks many subreddits from being accessed from the browser when using the default UI, redirecting to their app, for no reason other than moving users to the app. They do not even pretend for there to be any other reason for they have never given any explanation as to why they do this. It's some of the most user-hostile behaviour I've seen, even the usual…

Good to hear there’s fact behind my opinion. I hadn’t researched it deep enough but just figured it out based on my own experience on their site. I don’t visit Reddit often for 2 years now unless I really need to. And when I do, I go to the old.Reddit subdomain.

Question: which subreddits does Reddit block from the browser? Genuinely curious. Are they also blocked from third party apps like Apollo?

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

#509

Post by cutler »

codethief wrote: post #476
cutler wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

That doesn't look bad to me, though. Pretty much 90% of the code is just HTML, anyway, and I doubt it would be much shorter in jQuery. If you allow me a few comments on the code: > .then(res => { setYou(res[form.name1].planets) ; setOther(res[form.name2].planets) }) setYou, setOther will usually each trigger a re-rendering. It would be better to store them together if they're always changed together. > .then(res => d…

Great advice. Thanks. Somehow I think it proves my point, though - that SPA frameworks lead to endless complexity making the whole front-end industry the province of senior developers.

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

#510

Post by varrock »

vagrantJin wrote: post #270
toss1 wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This entire read seems to be that things are much better for YOU, the front-end developer. And yes, that makes a difference, you can deliver more features, faster, more reliably. But, if those sites just bog down and take double-digit seconds to load, even when properly deployed on scaleable delivery architectures, with fiber-optic speeds, and CAD/gamer-level power machines, they are junk. And I increasingly see exac…

I cant agree more. I could cry. Ive been on a crusade for over a year to scale back diddly js frameworks because 'scale'. Ive heard many bullshit excuses before but sacrificing performance and reliability for being "scalabable" is beyond mind boggling. It gives me a panic attack when medium articles are the chief architect and purveyors of software development truths. I live and work in developing countries and could…

How would you personally go about building a sophisticated web application?
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