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You probably don't need that hip web framework

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Re: You probably don't need that hip web framework

#21

Post by tdeck »

btown wrote: post #2

SPAs become necessary when the user experience requires bells and whistles, like cross-widget consistency of like/friend request counts (the original use case of React IIRC). It's not "you ain't gonna need it," it's "you are gonna need it, users will judge you by your fluidity, sure it's overkill right now, but the overhead may be less than the pain of a frontend rewrite since you may need it soon." I've often though…

Doesn't it ever backfire though? I've used plenty of SPAs that shouldn't have been, forcing me to wait for the page to load twice and increasing frustration. If they'd just stuck some AJAX where appropriate the experience would be so much better.

Re: You probably don't need that hip web framework

#22

Post by api_or_ipa »

irq11 wrote: post #16
api_or_ipa wrote: post #9

Why do we keep seeing posts like this? My team absolutely needs React/Redux/Sagas/Webpack/whatever-you-want-to-hate-on-today, to ship and yeah we ship our backend with Docker. Why do I know we need it? Because we have years of experience in our workflow and we understand the problems we need to solve in the development workflow and timeline our company uses. Do you know who doesn't understand our needs? Someone writi…

Because your team is the exception. Isn’t that implied by the title?

That's the thing though. Is my team really the exception? When you look at the highly immersive web that product managers and customers have come to expect, you simply can't build it without javascript. Once you've crossed that bridge, is it really easier to finagle some event handling using vanilla js/jquery or pull down create-react-app and get all the tooling necessary to 1-click-deploy to Heroku, S3 or Github pages and not have to deal with the multitude of bugs that hand rolled events and state can cause?

Re: You probably don't need that hip web framework

#23

Post by ummonk »

You can probably write your native code in assembly too, but having an abstracted language and libraries makes it a lot easier to write complex functionality.

Of course, if all you know is assembly and you don’t have the patience to learn a new language because you’re starting a new project that needs to get done quickly, go ahead and use what you know.

Re: You probably don't need that hip web framework

#24

Post by hombre_fatal »

irq11 wrote: post #16
api_or_ipa wrote: post #9

Why do we keep seeing posts like this? My team absolutely needs React/Redux/Sagas/Webpack/whatever-you-want-to-hate-on-today, to ship and yeah we ship our backend with Docker. Why do I know we need it? Because we have years of experience in our workflow and we understand the problems we need to solve in the development workflow and timeline our company uses. Do you know who doesn't understand our needs? Someone writi…

Because your team is the exception. Isn’t that implied by the title?

On the other hand, I'd say applications so trivial they couldn't benefit from something like React are the exception.

Re: You probably don't need that hip web framework

#25

Post by wwweston »

"Probably" perhaps overstates the case, but it's fair to imply there should be a question about if you need it, and the default answer should not always be yes.

Here's some heuristics I like:

If nearly all of your application's data presentation/processing needs map cleanly to HTTP/REST semantics for the various entities in the system... you probably don't.

If your UX involves representing/manipulating the same data in several different ways on the page and this data is going to change, especially in ways that don't map cleanly to HTTP semantics, you should consider that you do need the hip framework. Probability rises depending on how frequently user interactions produce different views of the data.

If your data is a headache to represent in HTML, you probably do (also, if you don't have an adequate general automated way to represent your data in HTML from some model description, you will likely either gravitate to solving this problem one way or another, or gravitate to a hip front-end framework).

If you ask yourself what problem you're solving with your front-end framework, and the answer either includes the word "modern" or another adjective describing a merit you aren't exactly sure relates to a specific problem to be solved, then you probably can't yet make an informed decision about whether you need that hip web framework. But, OTOH, making uninformed decisions is one way of getting the experience necessary to make informed ones, so...

Re: You probably don't need that hip web framework

#27

Post by fooddood »

api_or_ipa wrote: post #9

Why do we keep seeing posts like this? My team absolutely needs React/Redux/Sagas/Webpack/whatever-you-want-to-hate-on-today, to ship and yeah we ship our backend with Docker. Why do I know we need it? Because we have years of experience in our workflow and we understand the problems we need to solve in the development workflow and timeline our company uses. Do you know who doesn't understand our needs? Someone writi…

The hard part in my experience is that a lot of teams don't know if they absolutely need it. I have worked on some projects that are more hype driven development using React/Redux/Sagas for a barely interactive webapp. It adds a ton of complexity for little to no benefit.

Re: You probably don't need that hip web framework

#28

Post by torqueTorrent »

api_or_ipa wrote: post #9

Why do we keep seeing posts like this? My team absolutely needs React/Redux/Sagas/Webpack/whatever-you-want-to-hate-on-today, to ship and yeah we ship our backend with Docker. Why do I know we need it? Because we have years of experience in our workflow and we understand the problems we need to solve in the development workflow and timeline our company uses. Do you know who doesn't understand our needs? Someone writi…

"When you're holding a hammer, everything looks like a nail."

There is a tendency for mgmt to sign up engineers to a vision quest with pre-established non-negotiable requirements whereby the customer expects what would be tantamount to solving all the world's problems in one easy to use, intuitive SPA that 'just works, always'. This is a big factor in the endless new framework releases, mutually-exclusive complexities and vulnerabilities.

Re: You probably don't need that hip web framework

#29

Post by crimsonalucard »

api_or_ipa wrote: post #9

Why do we keep seeing posts like this? My team absolutely needs React/Redux/Sagas/Webpack/whatever-you-want-to-hate-on-today, to ship and yeah we ship our backend with Docker. Why do I know we need it? Because we have years of experience in our workflow and we understand the problems we need to solve in the development workflow and timeline our company uses. Do you know who doesn't understand our needs? Someone writi…

He could be right. The complexity of these front end frameworks decouples modules increases complexity by a significant amount. There is no way to prove that your current designs are the best possible way of solving your problem as designs by definition aren't proveable solutions.

To listen to him blindly is ignorant but to ignore him is just as perilous.

Re: You probably don't need that hip web framework

#30

Post by BigJono »

fooddood wrote: post #27
api_or_ipa wrote: post #9

Why do we keep seeing posts like this? My team absolutely needs React/Redux/Sagas/Webpack/whatever-you-want-to-hate-on-today, to ship and yeah we ship our backend with Docker. Why do I know we need it? Because we have years of experience in our workflow and we understand the problems we need to solve in the development workflow and timeline our company uses. Do you know who doesn't understand our needs? Someone writi…

The hard part in my experience is that a lot of teams don't know if they absolutely need it. I have worked on some projects that are more hype driven development using React/Redux/Sagas for a barely interactive webapp. It adds a ton of complexity for little to no benefit.

Can we stop grouping React, Redux and Sagas when discussing complexity/bloat? They all have totally different complexity profiles. For example React adds tons of software complexity but very little development complexity, whereas Redux is the polar opposite. And Saga is just a clusterfuck. I don't even understand how people can use it with a straight face.
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