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Don't make me think, or why I switched to Rails from JavaScript SPAs

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Re: Don't make me think, or why I switched to Rails from JavaScript SPAs

#181

Post by jonahx »

krisrm wrote: post #93
tylergetsay wrote: post #76

Am I the only one who simply looks at the business requirements when considering an SPA? Ive built music players, games, real-time chat apps, etc that would be very difficult or impossible with a server side rendering app.

Yeah whenever these SPA-slamming posts come up, I just try to imagine carpenters posting about why they switched to hammers from screwdrivers. They're just different tools that excel at solving different problems.

To use your analogy, what if a popular screwdriver company started a trend among young carpenters to use their screwdriver handles as hammers? And then large numbers of carpenters were driving nails with screwdriver handles instead of hammers?

That is where the SPA slamming is coming from.

It's not that people fail to grasp the concept of different tools for different jobs.

Re: Don't make me think, or why I switched to Rails from JavaScript SPAs

#182

Post by trimbo »

1_player wrote: post #69
codingdave wrote: post #7

I think the author went too deep into details here, as this crowd is full of people who are going to be able to rip pieces of this article to shreds. But doing so both misses the larger point and in the process proves it - Rails gave them a set of answers that are good enough so they don't need to delve deeper and can just focus on their app. Rails is not the only choice that does so. And people with broader skill se…

The issue I have with the JS world is that the most used libraries and frameworks are just "good enough for a small project" and no more than that. * Javascript has such a minimal standard library, you will need to get one or three third-party libraries to augment its core. * React is an excellent view library and nothing more. You will need to get one or three third-party system to turn it into a fully fledged web f…

> The issue I have with the JS world is that the most used libraries and frameworks are just "good enough for a small project" and no more than that.

Do people believe this about Angular? Not primarily a front end dev, but in my limited experience with React and Angular, it seems like Angular's strength is that it provides more structure for scaling to larger projects.

Re: Don't make me think, or why I switched to Rails from JavaScript SPAs

#183

Post by jeremyjh »

clement_b wrote: post #150
pphysch wrote: post #111

SPAs are the "Google-scale" of frontend tech. YAGNI unless you are Big (or trying to fleece VCs). SPAs are useful where the latency and overall UX of a button press can be translated to some tiny % increase in a KPI through A/B testing, etc. Where you want to track user behavior down to a pixel & microsecond, and wrapping every element in JS is the only way to get there. This is frankly irrelevant to 99% of projects…

This comment should be printed and put up on quite a few teams' wall.

It doesn't cite any evidence or sources, it just declares the opinion of one person on the internet as if they are facts. Who do think would be convinced by this that doesn't already agree?

Re: Don't make me think, or why I switched to Rails from JavaScript SPAs

#184

Post by wruza »

pictur wrote: post #19

Choosing something and making a decision is not as difficult as it seems. You don't have to when someone comes along and tells you "we should use pnpm because it's much faster". Before using any tool, you take a brief look at how it works and what it does, and decide accordingly. I don't understand why you see having more than one option as a problem.

why you see having more than one option as a problem

Because some of us are hardwired to choose carefully. If so, when we have to go buy some groceries we just want to get a decent car and drive. The car and driving itself is irrelevant or minutiae, but we can’t tell whether it could take left turns from the start. When there is no decent car by default, we try to be picky about every component, and when it’s almost perfect, it’s also night and the shop is closed.

It may be easy for you, for a combination of reasons: a huge experience, low perfectionism and high “fuck it, will sort it out later”-ism, and then something else. But it’s not a professional path we used to. Our professional path is to ask someone which car to buy and go buy it. But if you ask someone which js framework to use for regular tasks, you get this thread instead.

On top of that, your resume will miss a 3 years of Winch experience, which suddenly everyone demands when you lose a job or fail your company.

Re: Don't make me think, or why I switched to Rails from JavaScript SPAs

#185

Post by 1_player »

bauerd wrote: post #131
pphysch wrote: post #111

SPAs are the "Google-scale" of frontend tech. YAGNI unless you are Big (or trying to fleece VCs). SPAs are useful where the latency and overall UX of a button press can be translated to some tiny % increase in a KPI through A/B testing, etc. Where you want to track user behavior down to a pixel & microsecond, and wrapping every element in JS is the only way to get there. This is frankly irrelevant to 99% of projects…

Have you tried to implement interaction-rich applications such as calendars or text editors with server-side rendering? You won't be able to recreate the UX an SPA can afford, regardless of revenue.

Widgets require JS, of course. Javascript was born to sprinkle some of it on top of an HTML page, not to make a whole meal out of it. This is what GP is arguing about and I tend to agree. Single Page Apps are not worth the effort in my experience, apart from very niche use cases.

The velocity proposition and fantastic developer experience of writing JS in the backend and frontend and data layer is overrated and misleading. It's everything but.

Re: Don't make me think, or why I switched to Rails from JavaScript SPAs

#186

Post by mattferderer »

pphysch wrote: post #111

SPAs are the "Google-scale" of frontend tech. YAGNI unless you are Big (or trying to fleece VCs). SPAs are useful where the latency and overall UX of a button press can be translated to some tiny % increase in a KPI through A/B testing, etc. Where you want to track user behavior down to a pixel & microsecond, and wrapping every element in JS is the only way to get there. This is frankly irrelevant to 99% of projects…

In my experience as a user, these SPAs built by very large companies for a very large audience seem to be full of bugs & issues when they try to do to much.

Something like a music player seems to work great as a SPA. But something more complicated like Google AdWords or large financial apps & you're bound to run into issues often.

Re: Don't make me think, or why I switched to Rails from JavaScript SPAs

#189

Post by freddiecoleman »

ratww wrote: post #46
coffeefirst wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. And I think what makes Rails and Django shine is they have sound default answers. I’ve yet to see anything in Node that feels like a stable 1:1 replacement. Next.js is excellent, but you still need to sort out a lot of pieces on your own.

As others have pointed in this thread, there's NestJS, Sails.js and AdonisJS, which are closer to Rails than Express or Next.js. And there's Meteor too, like the sibling post mentioned. But to be fair 99% of JS backends I see are using Express (or AWS Lambda). Considering there's lots of choices I wonder if the problem is the fact the community never focused on a single solution. I wonder if a Merb/Rails-style merge…

Love using NestJS. It's true that most places are stuck using express for whatever reason so you have to be a bit ahead of the pack.

Re: Don't make me think, or why I switched to Rails from JavaScript SPAs

#190

Post by Gare »

simion314 wrote: post #152
dntrkv wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Javascript has such a minimal standard library, you will need to get one or three third-party libraries to augment its core Maybe 5-10 years ago, there is no need anymore > React is an excellent view library and nothing more. You will need to get one or three third-party system to turn it into a fully fledged web framework. Depends on your needs. Small app? React on its own is enough. Larger app? Add a router. That…

>Maybe 5-10 years ago, there is no need anymore Is still either create your own or install a random package that brings other 20 as dependencies. Example, you want to show an Alert or Yes/No popup, This are built-in everywhere but n Web world you need to review and install a third party thing, or create your own buggy or incomplete implementation. Maybe you want modal dialogs, this is a standard in GUI tookits but yo…

> As a language JS progressed a lot, so much I am not sure if switching to TS is a good idea or I just need to wait until JS will catch up with TS.

Can you elaborate on this? TS is just adding type checking to JS, the only runtime addition are enums. I doubt that JS will incorporate type checking anytime soon.

I mostly agree with your other points.

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