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

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

#101

Post by ensignavenger »

a_bonobo wrote: post #56
chrisco255 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To which I would reply that money is defined by three properties: 1. Store of Value 2. Unit of Account 3. Medium of Exchange Of which it's fair to say that several crypto currencies fit that bill.

Oh good, so Beanie Babies are also money :)

Beanie Babies would make a rather poor unit of account. As at any given time, two of the same model Beanie Baby can be worth two very different amounts in trade based on their condition. Whereas a dollar bill does not matter what its condition is (at least within a reasonable range), it is still worth a dollar. Also, two different models of Beanie Babies will vary in value with relation to each other, whereas a one dollar bill will generally always be worth 1/100th of a 100 dollar bill.

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

#102

Post by mg »

philote wrote: post #81
mg wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

Django is a super heavy framework that includes most anything you'd ever want. There's a ton to learn. Have you tried lighter-weight ones like Flask? I much prefer a lightweight web framework with an easy-to-use ORM/ODM. Also, even though you don't use frameworks, I assume you use various libraries to handle web requests and such, right?

How is Django more heavy than Flask?

When I think about heavy, I think about how hard it would be to replace the framework with my own code in the future. So I don't like magic.

One thing that keeps me from investigating Flask further is that Django seems to be way more popular:

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=django%2...

So it will probably stay around longer.

Me and other devs maintain this repo which shows how to get from a fresh Debian install to a running web app via different frameworks:

https://github.com/no-gravity/web_app_from_scratch

As you can see, it also has a Flask version.

Contributions are welcome!

As for libraries: PHP has great http and html support build in already. Python is a bit tricky in this regard. That's why I would give Django another try for new web projects. But I also had success just rolling my own http/html code in Python.

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

#103

Post by abecedarius »

dools wrote: 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

OK, my model of Thiel would say: are you offering me a thesis from bestselling author David Graeber, or is this a view that actually very few people hold which you're disguising as a popular one for some reason?

(i.e. he'd reject this as boringly conventional before it got to the level of does it make sense? I've only read a little bit of Thiel, like 2-3 blog posts worth.)

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

#104

Post by dinoreic »

xu_ituairo wrote: post #7
vlovich123 wrote: post #3

I think the next major change will be unified hybrid rendering. Render the initial view via SSR for speed, framework automatically injects more and more of the page transparently as user-driven events happen. All of this will be transparent and you only write the app once.

Do you mean something similar to Svelte becoming dominant?

I can't understand how Svelte is not more popular. From first time I saw it 4y ago I thought it was game changer, did not change opinion.

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

#105

Post by BackBlast »

safety1st wrote: post #97
datastack wrote: post #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 n…

I wouldn't say server side rendering is a "Thiel Truth," because it's a thing that is already popular and uncontroversial and agreed upon by millions. There is an echo chamber where this happened: * Facing massive datacenter costs, Google and Meta realized that if they could hand off rendering to the client, they could have smaller datacenters and save a lot of money. Things like React and Angular were born. Other co…

> Facing massive datacenter costs, ...Other companies with large datacenter costs followed suit, many monies were saved.

I can't think of anyone who doesn't want to save money on servers. Seems like a pretty good general win to me for using the client.

> complexity is generally the enemy

Agreed. But minimizing complexity doesn't require not using a heavy client. You can go fully the other way and make the backend a relatively simple permissions and validation mask on top of a database and let the front end hold all the relevant state.

Use client side rendering and have simplicity too.

I will admit that an SPA turns out to be easier to mess up and design really poorly, but I believe that this is a tooling maturity issue rather than fundamental to the platform. SSR frameworks have had over a decade longer to mature.

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

#106

Post by datastack »

safety1st wrote: post #97
datastack wrote: post #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 n…

I wouldn't say server side rendering is a "Thiel Truth," because it's a thing that is already popular and uncontroversial and agreed upon by millions. There is an echo chamber where this happened: * Facing massive datacenter costs, Google and Meta realized that if they could hand off rendering to the client, they could have smaller datacenters and save a lot of money. Things like React and Angular were born. Other co…

Interesting take. Haven't heard the argument before that it saves server costs. Not convinced that this is the case, but perhaps, for a google.

Reflecting, I suppose that businesses relying on Php/Laravel or Ruby are probably still enjoying simple SSR development. I've personally transitioned to Java and then .NET, and haven't seen SSR since. Which corner of software are you in, where you see SSR still being dominant?

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

#107

Post by MichaelZuo »

safety1st wrote: post #97
datastack wrote: post #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 n…

I wouldn't say server side rendering is a "Thiel Truth," because it's a thing that is already popular and uncontroversial and agreed upon by millions. There is an echo chamber where this happened: * Facing massive datacenter costs, Google and Meta realized that if they could hand off rendering to the client, they could have smaller datacenters and save a lot of money. Things like React and Angular were born. Other co…

It does sound like a classic cargo cult.

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

#108

Post by systemvoltage »

safety1st wrote: post #97
datastack wrote: post #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 n…

I wouldn't say server side rendering is a "Thiel Truth," because it's a thing that is already popular and uncontroversial and agreed upon by millions. There is an echo chamber where this happened: * Facing massive datacenter costs, Google and Meta realized that if they could hand off rendering to the client, they could have smaller datacenters and save a lot of money. Things like React and Angular were born. Other co…

[flagged]

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

#109

Post by BackBlast »

water9 wrote: post #86
nvm0n2 wrote: post #26

> What important truth do very few people agree with you on? Seems like answering with SSR would fail a Thiel interview for two reasons: 1. It's not important (in the grand scheme of things) 2. It's not a view that very few people hold. SSR was the standard way to do things for a couple of decades up until frameworks like React, and React itself now implements SSR, doesn't it? Thiel uses this question to try and dete…

SRS is more secure because it doesn’t send down any links a role can’t see including even the link to get-based access from the account. It’s hard to attack a surface that is small.

SSR has more potential for security issues because you're often rendering some set of data from your database, which may come from a user, out to a browser which will then parse and execute code based on that rendering.

You have to be sure your data going into the database doesn't have XSS escapes or your rendering of untrustworthy data doesn't have such XSS escapes.

Which is why you shouldn't roll your own SSR unless you are fully aware of this.

SPA doesn't have this problem as it will generally insert DB data into the DOM as text, no possibility of escape or execution by potentially malicious database entries. Not that you can't have issues in an SPA, but you have to do work to bring them about.

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

#110

Post by edanm »

safety1st wrote: post #97
datastack wrote: post #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 n…

I wouldn't say server side rendering is a "Thiel Truth," because it's a thing that is already popular and uncontroversial and agreed upon by millions. There is an echo chamber where this happened: * Facing massive datacenter costs, Google and Meta realized that if they could hand off rendering to the client, they could have smaller datacenters and save a lot of money. Things like React and Angular were born. Other co…

This is very wrong.

For one thing, I don't think the motivation of Google and Meta was datacenter costs, though I could be wrong about that.

But it's not that "VCs were pushing client-side SPA", it's that lots of the companies that wanted to build applications, found that they had a set of problems that was best solved by things like Angular. The state of the art before that for highly interactive client-side apps was JQuery, and for a few years, things like Backbone.

Angular solved a real problem - people wanted to build more complex and more interactive client applications in a browser, but just using regular JS (or JS with Jquery) led to really messy applications and was very hard on development.

You can try and handwave all that away as an echochamber, but I think the majority of the industry moved to SPA frameworks as solutions for building client-side apps.

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