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Server-side rendering is a better choice for many applications (2020)

timr.co

41–50 of 286 posts

Re: Server-side rendering is a better choice for many applications (2020)

#41

Wait until they find out that you don't even need to use client-side JavaScript frameworks to do their rendering on the server...

Sure, but the advantage is that if you can write your rendering logic once and have it run both server-side and client-side, you've saved a ton of work.

Re: Server-side rendering is a better choice for many applications (2020)

#42
post #32
post #13

First I’ve heard of this interview question but if anyone is wondering here is a guaranteed way to fail a job interview with Thiel by answering the question thusly: Money has never existed without taxation

He would undoubtably respond with, "What about cryptocurrencies?".

To which I would of course reply that they are not money ;)

Re: Server-side rendering is a better choice for many applications (2020)

#43
post #34

I honestly wonder if everything that is a best practice on the backend and frontend these days is a net negative compared to "Write your own PHP or Python code which outputs your own HTML+CSS+JS". Especially for indiemakers and startups by technical founders. All the frameworks add so much complexity and confusion. And I have seen several startups fail because when the developer was confronted with breaking changes o…

I’ve rolled my own mvc framework before, In php even! This was years ago when CakePHP was the new hotness and Laravel didn’t exist. Take it from someone who had your mentality and set off to make a tiny and no bs mvc that just gets the job done, the amount of work these frameworks are doing for you (backend frameworks) that you don’t consider, is why you should run a framework.

You don’t want to deal with processing a raw http request from the web server. You don’t want to split headers. You don’t want to sanitize input params, deal with character encoding, content types, gzipping, cache control, etags, basic authentication, flushing headers, chunking bodies, file streaming, tcp sockets, slow client avoidance, and probably 1000 other things I can’t recall.

No matter how unnecessarily complex you think a http framework might be, I assure you, it’s saving you from a mountain of already solved by people smarter than you or I complexity.

Re: Server-side rendering is a better choice for many applications (2020)

#44
post #12

> users would prefer your app as a website I hope by app you mean "webapp", because I sure don't want all my apps becoming websites. That's how Electron becomes more prevalent. Also, great to see a shout-out to D :)

I think they mean, if it isn't an application but should just be a website. Many things are designed as applications with a lot of behavior, when really they are just documents that would be better structured as a hypertext "site" with linked pages of content.

I really think this should be the first question on a project: Should this be a website or an application? I think the answer to a huge number of technical questions is dependent on the answer to this product question. And it seems like too few people are asking it, and are instead diving straight into making an application (whether web and native).

Re: Server-side rendering is a better choice for many applications (2020)

#45
post #31

All this noise around "back to the roots" template rendering seems to ignore the elephant in the room that FE devs DON'T want to work with jinja2, django templates and all this jazz as it is perceived as a devaluation of the role + they need to learn specific syntaxes instead of having a "one size fits all" approach like with js frameworks.

The market will find the developers who will do that and the lazy ones who want a “one size fits all solution” will have to adapt or get left behind.

Re: Server-side rendering is a better choice for many applications (2020)

#46
Lot of bashing of this idea, not sure why. The entire industry has shifted from "web developer" to frontend/backend developers. What used to be a web developer is now called full stack.

It seems like a big deal to me and the entire shift is an indicator of how much the IT community is behind front end clients talking to a separate back end. Server side rendering is no longer considered normal. Server site rendering now means something entirely different. It is about running your frontend code on the back end, So you still have the separation, but instead running it on the same machine. Now the same ui code has to be compatible with two different run times. This is much, much more complex than traditional server side rendering.

I'm glad we now have things like single page apps and client site interactive applications, because some apps were really not possible with server side rendering unless with a lot of Jquery hackery that quickly becomes unmaintainable...

However, I do think that front end technologies are overused, so I agree with the author, And I also think this is objectively a contrarian opinion, considering my initial point.

Re: Server-side rendering is a better choice for many applications (2020)

#47
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even better would be to use normal words rather than expecting people to know what "thiel truth" means.

I have trouble distinguishing the difference between Thiel Truths and Bathory Truths so this would be helpful for me.

what is a Bathory truth - is this something like "She didn't really bathe in virgin's blood"?

Re: Server-side rendering is a better choice for many applications (2020)

#48
post #13

First I’ve heard of this interview question but if anyone is wondering here is a guaranteed way to fail a job interview with Thiel by answering the question thusly: Money has never existed without taxation

I’ve never met the man, but in my experience with more locally famous/infamous people with roughly similar reputations is that there are few things they love more than a really strong intellectual sparring partner.

Of course many boring posters on HN will never accept that because their models of the world only allow for 1 dimensional villains on the other side of any ideological disagreements.

Re: Server-side rendering is a better choice for many applications (2020)

#49
post #34

I honestly wonder if everything that is a best practice on the backend and frontend these days is a net negative compared to "Write your own PHP or Python code which outputs your own HTML+CSS+JS". Especially for indiemakers and startups by technical founders. All the frameworks add so much complexity and confusion. And I have seen several startups fail because when the developer was confronted with breaking changes o…

Do they have a good success ratio? Do you have some data to back that assertion up where you've analyzed startup success by whether they used SSR or CSR?

My own personal experience has been working at a large enterprise SSR app that ultimately failed to keep pace with increasing competition (but certainly achieved some success with basic SSR forms in the early 00s), then later worked for a team that had a $500M exit for which the CSR app and backend Node.js API was built with a minimal team size of just a few dozen devs.

Re: Server-side rendering is a better choice for many applications (2020)

#50
post #34

I honestly wonder if everything that is a best practice on the backend and frontend these days is a net negative compared to "Write your own PHP or Python code which outputs your own HTML+CSS+JS". Especially for indiemakers and startups by technical founders. All the frameworks add so much complexity and confusion. And I have seen several startups fail because when the developer was confronted with breaking changes o…

I’ve rolled my own mvc framework before, In php even! This was years ago when CakePHP was the new hotness and Laravel didn’t exist. Take it from someone who had your mentality and set off to make a tiny and no bs mvc that just gets the job done, the amount of work these frameworks are doing for you (backend frameworks) that you don’t consider, is why you should run a framework. You don’t want to deal with processing…

    You don’t want to deal with ...
Well, I do all that and it works just fine for me.

All my projects are 100% my own code down to the core. No frameworks, nothing. There might be some traces of jquery in there from when browsers were more unreliable. I don't even use that these days.

To get to know those frameworks, I built some projects with Symfony, Laravel, Django and some others. But it didn't stick. They are too aggressive in their "do it my way, don't worry what happens behind the scenes, let me do the magic" approach. I had the best impression of Django. That is the only one I might give another try.

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