Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

SPAs Were a Mistake

gomakethings.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

561–570 of 637 posts

Re: SPAs Were a Mistake

#561

Post by funcDropShadow »

littlecranky67 wrote: post #547
int_19h wrote: post #538

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then why aren't we working on improving the databases to allow for such complex rules, and instead wrap it in another layer (often multiple) to do all this stuff there?

because a database should not hold your business logic. It should hold your data, and that it can do well. See also my other post on parent for more reasoning.

I beg to differ in many interesting cases, we put at least some parts of the business logic into the database. The table design is a direct consequence of the business logic, the same is true for constraints and triggers.

Re: SPAs Were a Mistake

#562

Post by scarmig »

westoncb wrote: post #507
shkkmo wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> From what I can tell most of the disagreement about SPAs results from devs who are building things that aren't app-like railing against their futility vs devs who are, who become perplexed by the vitriol when they have immediate experience with their architectural benefits. The SPA criticics from the article and this thread have repeatedly said that their issue is not with building things that need the benefits an…

I get that that's the biggest problem, but there are plenty of people in the thread talking about how they're a bad idea in general (including the comment I was replying to)—which incidentally lines up with the (apparently) clickbait title "SPAs were a mistake".

For the record, I was making a general point about one of the tradeoffs with an SPA vs MPA, not making the claim that MPAs are universally better than SPAs for all use cases. I think most reasonable people can agree that there are places where SPAs are called for and places where they're not. It's the ambiguous cases that draw the conflict, and psychologically the anti-SPA people focus on the really shitty ones and the pro-SPA people focus on the use cases that would be impossible in an MPA.

Also, for what it's worth, I've worked full-time on one of the largest SPA projects in the world (~500 engineers contributing frontend code to it on an average week), so this is not coming from a place of total ignorance.

Re: SPAs Were a Mistake

#563

Post by dragonwriter »

littlecranky67 wrote: post #546
dragonwriter wrote: post #540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The combination of DB permissions, DB constraints, and simple (SQL, not procedural language) triggers gets you a lot, including the ability to enforce rules like the one you mention.

Yes, you can enforce a lot through SQL triggers/stored procedures etc. But you often end up abusing your DB/SQL as a business logic layer, where your business logic is encoded in a huge set of row/column permission and custom SQL triggers . This tightly couples your database into your whole business application stack. Especially in Oracle PL/SQL, I've seen this often abused to an extend where no one ever understood t…

> But you often end up abusing your DB/SQL as a business logic layer, where your business logic is encoded in a huge set of row/column permission and custom SQL triggers.

That's not “abuse”. Admittedly, it's no longer an essential best practice for most systems, the way it used to be viewed, because it's more common to have a single application which fully owns the database and not to (at least in idealized theory, though very some ops staff still end up with direct access to the prod DB) allow access by other means, so in theory it doesn't tend to be necessary to avoid either circumvention of rules or (inevitably inconsistent, as well as expensive to maintain) duplication of logic.

Re: SPAs Were a Mistake

#564

Post by craigkerstiens »

fendy3002 wrote: post #414
craigkerstiens wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi Simon, why'd you pull me in ;) We recently went a rewrite of our frontend for https://www.crunchybridge.com from SPA to more "basic" request response app and couldn't be happier. Previously was SPA with React and we rebuilt from scratch with request/response using Node. In places we still leverage react components for re-usable frontend bits, but no more SPA and state management. As you've mentioned in some of you…

My knowledge is limited on the front end. May I know which Node framework do you use? Is it NextJS? If not, what do you think about using NextJS because I really consider it a better approach and want to use it at new projects.

We were actually less framework than more. Basic express app. We explored Next and almost went that way.

Re: SPAs Were a Mistake

#565

Post by craigkerstiens »

mwcampbell wrote: post #411
craigkerstiens wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi Simon, why'd you pull me in ;) We recently went a rewrite of our frontend for https://www.crunchybridge.com from SPA to more "basic" request response app and couldn't be happier. Previously was SPA with React and we rebuilt from scratch with request/response using Node. In places we still leverage react components for re-usable frontend bits, but no more SPA and state management. As you've mentioned in some of you…

What server-side framework did you use for the request/response rewrite?

It was all note on the request/response as a basic express app.

Re: SPAs Were a Mistake

#566

Post by westoncb »

scarmig wrote: post #562
westoncb wrote: post #507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get that that's the biggest problem, but there are plenty of people in the thread talking about how they're a bad idea in general (including the comment I was replying to)—which incidentally lines up with the (apparently) clickbait title "SPAs were a mistake".

For the record, I was making a general point about one of the tradeoffs with an SPA vs MPA, not making the claim that MPAs are universally better than SPAs for all use cases. I think most reasonable people can agree that there are places where SPAs are called for and places where they're not. It's the ambiguous cases that draw the conflict, and psychologically the anti-SPA people focus on the really shitty ones and t…

I excerpted and replied to something specific from your comment which read to me as essentially "even the cases that seem to need it probably don't" which matches both the tenor of (many of) the replies and the title of the article. But if I misread you my apologies.

Re: SPAs Were a Mistake

#567

Post by westoncb »

Ensorceled wrote: post #544
westoncb wrote: post #507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get that that's the biggest problem, but there are plenty of people in the thread talking about how they're a bad idea in general (including the comment I was replying to)—which incidentally lines up with the (apparently) clickbait title "SPAs were a mistake".

That’s the thing, they are a bad idea in general because, in general, people ARE building things that don’t benefit from an SPA article. You’re the one extrapolating that they are saying ALL SPAs are bad.

> You’re the one extrapolating that they are saying ALL SPAs are bad

This was not my extrapolation. But if you skim over a comment you're likely to perceive it as falling into one broad camp or another whether that's the case or not.

Re: SPAs Were a Mistake

#568

Post by UltraViolence »

manigandham wrote: post #237
mattmanser wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Asp.net web forms absolutely sucked. They fundamentally misunderstood HTML and how the internet even worked. Modern Razor's pretty good (not Razor Pages, they also suck) which is probably what you mean. But it's not that much different from Rails, Laravel, Django, etc.

What’s wrong with razor pages? They’re fantastically simple and productive. And WebForms wasn't a misunderstanding. It was a deliberate and brilliant design that brought WinForm developers and their experience to the web and allowed them to build complex web apps two decades ago that still work to this day.

WebForms was a complete disaster, made solely to allow Microsoft salesmen to quickly slap together a demo.

The problems started when you wanted to put together a REAL application. Because the entire paradigm of a web application programmed like a desktop application was flawed it resulted into an endless stream of headaches and workarounds, with bloated, complex and slow applications as a result.

In that sense ASP.NET MVC was a breath of fresh air.

Re: SPAs Were a Mistake

#569

Post by UltraViolence »

marcos100 wrote: post #552
mattmanser wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Asp.net web forms absolutely sucked. They fundamentally misunderstood HTML and how the internet even worked. Modern Razor's pretty good (not Razor Pages, they also suck) which is probably what you mean. But it's not that much different from Rails, Laravel, Django, etc.

By Modern Razor you mean Blazor components?

Razor Pages.

Re: SPAs Were a Mistake

#570

Post by XCSme »

Also, the majority of websites on the web are landing pages, blogs, news websites or e-commerce sites, all of which are inherently multipage.

SPAs should be used creating "applications" (as stated by the "A" in SPA), not websites.

Post reply on HN