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

None of my projects want to be SPAs

whatisjasongoldstein.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 362 posts

Re: None of my projects want to be SPAs

#151

Post by freehunter »

rossdavidh wrote: post #108

This may be a mean thing to say, but basically I think SPA's are massively overused, because developers want to demonstrate that they can do them. Why? Because big companies like Facebook and Google use them. Why? Because they actually are doing things that require them. 99% of the SPAs in production are things that should have been done the old Rails/Django/Laravel way, but that would not set you up as a developer w…

The other day I was arguing this exactly in a thread here about Ruby. People argue that Rails is outdated and is irrelevant for "modern web development", even though the web is not as modern as most people might think. Even what Facebook does, the only really hard part is the sheer scale they operate at. Facebook (the website) is not a single page app and other than the scale could be done in Rails with some AJAX sprinkled in or even Wordpress with some plugins.

People use SPA frameworks and make SPAs with them and those SPAs end up functioning exactly the same as any Rails/Django/Laravel site except the URL bar doesn't change. MVC is still the way the web is built, except for the people who got bored and wanted to make web development even harder than it already is.

YAGNI.

Re: None of my projects want to be SPAs

#152

Post by Slartie »

repsilat wrote: post #140
s_y_n_t_a_x wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really simple, if you're developing a web app, use a SPA stack. If you're developing a web page, use the minimal amount of tech you need on top of HTML, ideally where the HTML functions without JS.

Does that help much? The distinction between "web app" and "web page" seems fuzzier than the question "would a SPA lib/framework be useful here?" Is Reddit a web app? Is Twitter? Facebook? They all started with server-generated HTML, all kinda feel "document-like", all of them involve scrolling (if that means anything.) Is the "app" boundary further along the chain, like at Google Docs? I think instead of trying to c…

None of them is a web app. All of them want to provide certain views on their content that are uniquely identified by their URLs. This is especially true for Twitter and Reddit, which both aim to have their views on tweets and threads to be indexed by search engines.

Facebook is probably the least clear one, since they put great effort into eliminating discoverability and accessibility from "outside", i.e. without a Facebook account. They're basically the AOL of today, which was a classic application back then that tried to contain a proprietary "web" of stuff in itself, only accessible if you ran their "browser" application, had an account with them and were logged in, and that "AOL Internet" of course had its own search mechanisms, just like Facebook has its own sophisticated search. However, they're not fully closed-up, they just try really hard to nag you into having an account, which is why I'm inclined to still put them in the "website" camp.

However, all of these web sites surely contain certain parts that are in itself "web apps" and that are pretty much isolated from the basic parts of the site (albeit possibly interacting with it at well-defined points through APIs). I guess that this is a logical result of the large engineering teams that are working constantly on what is basically the same big website - at some point, in order to scale out further, it just becomes economic and practical to effectively isolate certain features into mostly separated "apps".

Re: None of my projects want to be SPAs

#153

Post by ashelmire »

I don't think many projects need to be SPAs. But if you're using node for your backend anyway, I think it's basically equal work to make something an SPA vs a non-SPA. The SPA effectively handles the routing for you, and I think react-router is pretty easy to use.

The speed benefits are noticeable on sites where you're doing a lot of internal navigation. But you can just as easily make a slow SPA (see JIRA).

So I guess in the end, do whatever takes less development time. Which usually isn't an SPA, just because there isn't really a good framework that reduces effort required. Rails and turbolinks are pretty legit.

Re: None of my projects want to be SPAs

#154

Post by hombre_fatal »

kerkeslager wrote: post #117
ghthor wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Global variables are different from global state. Every program has global state, whether you like it or not. Global variables are a poor way to declare, mutate, and read global state.

> Every program has global state Could you explain what you mean by this? My intuition here is that what you're saying is true in a trivial sense, but that most state CAN BE (and should be) local if you're breaking your programs into reasonable building blocks.

Like the state of the logged-in user.

I think these debates about global variables or state could be much more specific, though.

For example, we tend to realize that letting any component access a `require('./store').currentUser` singleton may make testing harder, but this global dependency still exists when, say, it's distributed to all components through the React context. I reckon most people are thinking of the singleton example when they lambast Redux but it certainly doesn't have to be that way.

Re: None of my projects want to be SPAs

#155

Post by kerkeslager »

johannes1234321 wrote: post #126
kerkeslager wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Every program has global state Could you explain what you mean by this? My intuition here is that what you're saying is true in a trivial sense, but that most state CAN BE (and should be) local if you're breaking your programs into reasonable building blocks.

You have information which has global nature, used in multiple sorts of the application. This could be, among other things - STDIN/STDOUT/STDERR file handles - static configuration - some parts of runtime configuration - application info (in a game maybe current score, current level, active players, ...) All that information exists only once and is needed in many parts.

Okay, I think we're talking about different things. I don't think of stdin/stdout/stderr or static configuration as state because they don't change. Typically when I talk about state, I'm talking about mutable data that may change over the lifetime of a program.

Re: None of my projects want to be SPAs

#156

Post by bryanrasmussen »

freehunter wrote: post #151
rossdavidh wrote: post #108

This may be a mean thing to say, but basically I think SPA's are massively overused, because developers want to demonstrate that they can do them. Why? Because big companies like Facebook and Google use them. Why? Because they actually are doing things that require them. 99% of the SPAs in production are things that should have been done the old Rails/Django/Laravel way, but that would not set you up as a developer w…

The other day I was arguing this exactly in a thread here about Ruby. People argue that Rails is outdated and is irrelevant for "modern web development", even though the web is not as modern as most people might think. Even what Facebook does, the only really hard part is the sheer scale they operate at. Facebook (the website) is not a single page app and other than the scale could be done in Rails with some AJAX spr…

sure, although modern browser apis mean the url bar can change in a reasonable way

Re: None of my projects want to be SPAs

#157

Post by hu3 »

laszlokorte wrote: post #118
kadendogthing wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> built last year after the react prototype was to slow on old devices: Do you have a public implementation available for review? I'm having trouble understanding why this would be the case (I am pretty familiar with React's implementation). >Render all pages/routes/states into a single html file (size ~2mb) That's not good at all for mobile web pages.

This is one page/app I built that way [0]. In this particular case it's not even fully optimized (eg js and css not minified, loads some external images...) [0] https://app.ishl.eu/

Took 4 seconds to load on mobile. But after that, the navigation was lightning-fast. Not bad.

Re: None of my projects want to be SPAs

#158

Post by bryanrasmussen »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #144
rossdavidh wrote: post #108

This may be a mean thing to say, but basically I think SPA's are massively overused, because developers want to demonstrate that they can do them. Why? Because big companies like Facebook and Google use them. Why? Because they actually are doing things that require them. 99% of the SPAs in production are things that should have been done the old Rails/Django/Laravel way, but that would not set you up as a developer w…

Well, SPAs are attractive even for websites that don't particularly benefit from them because of the technical attractiveness of having the website be like any other client that consumes your server's API.

sure but there are very few websites in the world that need to publicize an api, basically only sites that need to be able to function as applications. once you have a site that needs to be an application arguing for it to be single page is not that great a leap.

Re: None of my projects want to be SPAs

#159

Post by 5trokerac3 »

spricket wrote: post #63

I've found the most annoying aspect of using a SPA is having to consume your own API's. Using Swagger or gRPC on both ends helps immensely. These, combined with Angular CLI or Create React App, allow me to be just as productive as the pre-spa days

I think the beauty of SPAs is consuming your own APIs, because it makes you realize that your website is just another client application.

Nobody worth their salt would recommend coupling display components and database manipulation together in an iOS or Android app. A webpage is the same thing, because it's not running on your server, it's running in the browser on the user's computer.

With this blog post, like most "I don't like X technology" blog posts, I find myself asking, "does the author not like this technology, or has he not taken the time to become a real SME in it?"

Re: None of my projects want to be SPAs

#160

Post by scruple »

rossdavidh wrote: post #108

This may be a mean thing to say, but basically I think SPA's are massively overused, because developers want to demonstrate that they can do them. Why? Because big companies like Facebook and Google use them. Why? Because they actually are doing things that require them. 99% of the SPAs in production are things that should have been done the old Rails/Django/Laravel way, but that would not set you up as a developer w…

> I have also witnessed discussions where management admits that they want something done in an SPA so that they can show that work to their investors, as a means of getting funding to do other projects.

Absolutely. This extends well beyond SPAs, too, in my experience. I recently burned part of a month explaining to my senior management chain why you don't just, literally, "do machine learning." Of course, it turns out that the ask was coming from the C-suite, who wanted to put it on a slide somewhere because "everyone is doing machine learning, we need to do machine learning."

Post reply on HN