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

Build your own web framework

vercel.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 155 posts

Re: Build your own web framework

#101

Post by hsn915 »

woojoo666 wrote: post #86
tambourine_man wrote: post #77

What a sad state “modern” web dev is in. I’m glad that I’m living in a much faster and simpler world, but I fear, for end users and developers alike, that it is an ever shrinking one. I really can’t understand the appeal of what, to my eyes, amount to endless layers of needless complexity. I wish articles such as this one were more common: https://alexcabal.com/posts/standard-ebooks-and-classic-web-... This is the we…

> I wish articles such as this one were more common: > https://alexcabal.com/posts/standard-ebooks-and-classic-web-... > This is the web I want and love. Worth noting that according to their article, Standard EBooks does not use javascript on their page. This might work for them, and it might work for you, but in many cases users want SPAs and interactivity (Google Maps, Google Docs, etc)

Users don't want SPAs. Users want software that works reliably.

Most SPAs are anything but reliable. If you talk to most non programmers, they hate computers and software and think pretty much all software sucks.

Sure, maps and docs are not possible without client side programming, but most websites are actually not maps nor docs.

Re: Build your own web framework

#102

Post by glenngillen »

Look, I can sometimes be pretty quick to bemoan the state of modern web dev. I don't do it enough these days to be able to keep up with the current trend. So once or twice a year when I get the itch I inevitably spend more time than I should screaming about having to learn React's latest way to do some new thing, or that everyone has switched from npm to yarn and back again, or... there's always something. Lots of somethings.

The discourse on HN whenever this topic comes up is tiresome though and not at all to the level you'd expect on most topics from this audience. It's the unfiltered dumping of that emotional reaction I outlined above.

You know what? You can still build things the old way! Nobody has taken that away. It still works exactly as you'd expect. Do a bunch of HTML, lay it all out using tables, do inline styling. Host it on an Apache server. It'll be fine.

To think these were the glory days of dev though just washes away the fact that it was "good enough" for the subset of people that were lucky enough to have access to the internet back then. who were probably only a hop or two away from an academic backbone that was servicing them. Who, if you were in a relatively remote part of the planet like myself, would likely have a caching proxy server in there to improve the performance because most universities being able to cache the content of a huge part of the internet was a totally feasible undertaking back then.

But now half the planet is connected. With huge variance in the speed and latency on which they connect, huge variance in the types of devices they're using, incredibly distributed relative to where the content is served, and with entirely new expectations for the type of content they want and the way they expect to interact with it.

Sure, modern dev has lots of room for a simpler devex. Read through the OP though and you'll see it's because there has been a shift to prioritize the experience of the end users above that of the developers. That's what those list of features are for. You're still free to ignore it and build stuff the old way, just accept whose needs you're putting first in the process.

Re: Build your own web framework

#103

Post by tr1ll10nb1ll »

marmada wrote: post #73

This is too funny. I predicted that when I entered this post the first comment would be HN people bemoaning complexity. And indeed it was. The commenter's proposed solution was WASM. Wasm doesn't solve the issues in this post. What does this post talk about: - serving content from the edge (wasm doesn't do anything there) - asset optimization (wasm doesn't help) - pre-rendering complex pages to static HTML+css (wasm…

It’s like they are either getting old and don’t like to keep up with modern web development but it’s easy to see this behavior elsewhere too.

Aversion towards new way of doing things where people feel like the old way was just working is too common and predictable sometimes. “Things work” using old way, but, does that mean that no optimizations are to be made? Optimizations further lead to reiteration of the way we do things.

Also, an individual can stick to their old way of doing things but to rant over the new way is just- tasteless.

Re: Build your own web framework

#104

Post by rglover »

dfee wrote: post #53

I’ve been looking a lot at RedwoodJS, but it doesn’t seem to be “just right”. Don’t know if I’m bike-shedding, either. I do think React is a requisite for a rich application (not blog). I think auth + DB + deploy + fe/be in one asset is challenging. I certainly get why folks build their own constantly. But you burn out before you make any real progress. I’m not sure we’re really achieving any higher level abstraction…

You might dig Joystick: https://github.com/cheatcode/joystick.

Re: Build your own web framework

#105

Post by tr1ll10nb1ll »

henning wrote: post #19

This is one of the stupidest, most circuitous ways to get a simple application up and running since the days of the J2EE Pet Shop example.

It quite literally starts with, "ever wondered what it takes to build your own web framework that also deploys to edge and serverless infrastructure?”. They are not suggesting you to do this to get your “simple application up and running”.

If you dislike it so much, simply don’t use it. I don’t use it either but calling it stupid is not a stretch. It’s worse.

Re: Build your own web framework

#106

Post by Winsaucerer »

hsn915 wrote: post #101
woojoo666 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wish articles such as this one were more common: > https://alexcabal.com/posts/standard-ebooks-and-classic-web-... > This is the web I want and love. Worth noting that according to their article, Standard EBooks does not use javascript on their page. This might work for them, and it might work for you, but in many cases users want SPAs and interactivity (Google Maps, Google Docs, etc)

Users don't want SPAs. Users want software that works reliably. Most SPAs are anything but reliable. If you talk to most non programmers, they hate computers and software and think pretty much all software sucks. Sure, maps and docs are not possible without client side programming, but most websites are actually not maps nor docs.

> Most SPAs are anything but reliable. If you talk to most non programmers, they hate computers and software and think pretty much all software sucks.

Expanding on this, I had a Dell XPS 9550 running Linux until the M1 Macbook came out. The XPS was a pretty powerful machine when I first bought it, but as always happens, hardware requirements for software increased while my hardware stayed static.

And the software whose requirements increased: websites, and specifically SPA's. It was absolutely noticeable visiting many (but not all) SPA's, with Jira being the worst offender, just how slow those websites are. It doesn't have to be much slower to just grind at you, and for you to want to finish and leave that site as quickly as possible.

Now I have a much faster desktop with a 5950x processor, and a Macbook Air M1 for when I'm moving around. I don't notice the website slowness anymore (except on reddit perhaps), and it isn't really an issue for me anymore. But I'm a software developer among other things, and I spend a lot of time on computers, so I get good hardware. We who are developers are likely an exception to the general population who will be experiencing the web as I did on my XPS, or perhaps even worse.

Re: Build your own web framework

#107

Post by coryvirokmobile »

tomnipotent wrote: post #30
koluna wrote: post #13

The more I see these announcements, the more I wonder - what is the appeal of something like Vercel and the likes? On the surface it seems like AWS/GCP/Azure/whichever big cloud provider can replicate literally everything they build within their infrastructure quite easily. Why host your core infra in a BigCo cloud and then the site on Vercel?

At the end of the day, even when it's running sever-side or on the edge, it still all exists to deliver a front-end experience. Vercel makes delivering such an experience more palatable. This includes isolated environments that can easily be shared and a CDN-as-default deploy model. It's like someone sprinkled a little Heroku magic on a specific front-end deployment workflow.

Until Vercel adds a solid and flexible database as a service, I'll continue using Google Cloud Run + Cloud SQL + Cloud Build for a "no server" solution.

Granted, the Vercel edge network is amazing, but Google routes internal requests way way faster than the edge can communicate with Google's infra.

Vercel is great for things that aren't stateful and for automagic build configuration and asset serving. But not great for anything needing a DB.

Re: Build your own web framework

#108

Post by cercatrova »

hsn915 wrote: post #81
tambourine_man wrote: post #77

What a sad state “modern” web dev is in. I’m glad that I’m living in a much faster and simpler world, but I fear, for end users and developers alike, that it is an ever shrinking one. I really can’t understand the appeal of what, to my eyes, amount to endless layers of needless complexity. I wish articles such as this one were more common: https://alexcabal.com/posts/standard-ebooks-and-classic-web-... This is the we…

With modern hardware it is very easy to serve millions of daily users from a single machine with simple software. No one bothers because everyone loves their fast-as-a-snail framework in their favorite slow scripting language and they need massive infrastructure to scale it to serve less than 1k concurrent users. Programmers have no one to blame but themselves.

Speak for yourself. Tools these days are much more ergonomic, not to mention faster than ever before. I host a website on DigitalOcean with 0.5 GB RAM and 1 vCPU that can support millions of requests and runs with just a git push. Try doing that in the 90s.

Re: Build your own web framework

#109

Post by Zandikar »

glenngillen wrote: post #102

Look, I can sometimes be pretty quick to bemoan the state of modern web dev. I don't do it enough these days to be able to keep up with the current trend. So once or twice a year when I get the itch I inevitably spend more time than I should screaming about having to learn React's latest way to do some new thing, or that everyone has switched from npm to yarn and back again, or... there's always something. Lots of so…

> there has been a shift to prioritize the experience of the end users

I was mostly on the same page with you till I got to this phrase. My immediate reaction to this was laughing in disbelief. The internet has never been more outright hostile to end users than it is today, even when the underlying intent is morally good (Would you like some cookies?).

Devex and the web in general (back end, front end, user experience, etc) is very different than it was. It's better in many ways. It's worse in many ways too. To assert that we've "sacrificed" devex for the sake of the end user is laughable though.

Re: Build your own web framework

#110

Post by cercatrova »

jeshin wrote: post #69
skadamat wrote: post #55

Do we ever think we'll collapse all of the complexity layers for programming on the web? Coming from other languages, I'm finding that the agreed-upon web standards make development super hard (we have to collectively build these towers of babel on top of them, since we can't fix the underlying stuff) I guess WASM maybe is one possible solution here

on the note of babel, I don't usually do front end stuff but the other day I wanted to transpile one single javascript file to support older browsers, one time and then never again. I tried for like an hour and I could not figure out how to do it, without setting up like a whole environment/pipeline for it. My expectation going into it was "surely there's some sort of command that just lets you do input file -> outpu…

If it's only one file, you could just go to the Babel website where they have a playground and paste it in, voilà, converted for older browsers. Now place the output file wherever you want.
Post reply on HN