Ask HN: Getting tired of complexity in web development • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Getting tired of complexity in web development

#281

Post by phendrenad2 » Tue, Oct 11, 2022, 3:24 AM UTC

super256 wrote: post #278

phendrenad2 wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This data isn't magically stored in the air and if you use more than a single machine I'm curious, what do you think the OP meant when they said "stateless"? > I assume that you haven't worked at scale with php Oh I have actually! But I'm curious, how many sites do you think have a high enough scale to need php-fpm and opcache?

> I'm curious, what do you think the OP meant when they said "stateless"? Any kind of user session where user information is stored for access across multiple pages. When you use $_SESSION and write a variable into it, the content is persisted on the server and the user gets a cookie with an ID which points to their session variables. This is state that needs to be shared across servers when want you scale out. The o…

Okay, I think the OP instead meant that server-based rendering is more "stateless" because you do a full page refresh to get any new content, as opposed to a SPA where state management is a big problem.

Re: Ask HN: Getting tired of complexity in web development

#282

Post by jmconfuzeus » Tue, Oct 11, 2022, 3:18 PM UTC

uhrush wrote: post #254

jmconfuzeus wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not OP but I'll give you an example concerning a project that used Material UI which is a React UI component library. For one, we had to rewrite the app 3 times because the library switched from Less, to 2 different css-in-js solutions across 3 different major versions. Then we switched to server side rendering and suffered some weird glitches. Turns out, when using SSR, styles get rendered twice: once on the server…

That's very fair, do you still think it was a net positive opposed to writing your own component library? https://mui.com/system/styles/basics/ It looks like MUI had some decent intentions in their changes. https://mui.com/material-ui/guides/server-rendering/#mui-on-... It also looks like they called out how to address the SSR issue (maybe they recently added these docs?). I kind of accept this type of friction as a…

I think we would be much better off using traditional html, bootstrap scss, and some jquery for interactions. But nobody likes to be boring so React it is.

React itself isn't really the problem because there are some valid use cases for it. However, it's currently being thrown at every web development problem even when there are better and more stable solutions.

But if I had to use React today, I'd stay away from MUI for sure since they constantly demonstrated a lack of maturity.

Re: Ask HN: Getting tired of complexity in web development

#283

Post by Schwolop » Wed, Oct 12, 2022, 2:51 AM UTC

sangnoir wrote: post #217

cyanydeez wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Basically, it's the problem with vaccines and the rise of antivaxxers. Because vaccines were so successful in their harm reduction to even elimination, there h created a perverse belief that vaccines were not effective, and then that they were actually harmful. Being ubiquitous and their effects the same, and the absence of their necessary disease. Tools that solve problems experience a lifecycle that eventually if s…

Same goes for the Y2K problem: prodigious efforts went into solving the problem, which was mostly averted. But since "nothing happened", people started asking if the whole thing was overblown. More on topic, web frameworks solve the following problems for me, which I guess are things now taken for granted: 1. Provide a standard API across all popular browswes by papering over subtle differences in JS- or rendering-en…

I was coming here to say that the term for a problem which when solved makes people question whether it was necessary after all is a "Wicked Problem"[1], only to then discover that that's not it at all. So now I'm stumped - what is the word for that?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_problem

Re: Ask HN: Getting tired of complexity in web development

#284

Post by quickthrower2 » Wed, Oct 12, 2022, 10:20 AM UTC

thepra wrote: post #236

mhuffman wrote: post #153

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>NoSQL, frankly, is utterly pointless, and I have no clue why it ever caught on. It caught on because "feature factory" startups used simple frameworks to make an MVP and didn't know shit about RDBMS administration, optimization, or schema planning so when it was schema migration time it was time for things to start breaking. With NoSQL (specifically the "document store" types) you could just keep throwing shit in th…

I've been through projects that gave schema migrations and when there was any mistake or error during schema migrations it was a real big pain to rollback, fix and release. With mongodb this is gone, schemas are no more of an issue as long as you make sure to keep the models sane and the business logic of the fields up to date.

Schemaless means anything can come put of the DB, or be put onto it. It adds a lot of work to the app developer to keep things validated and secure and there are more exceptions to handle. Definitely a trade off. Never had big issues migrating schema-ed databases.

Re: Ask HN: Getting tired of complexity in web development

#285

Post by quickthrower2 » Wed, Oct 12, 2022, 10:29 AM UTC

0xblinq wrote: post #273

erlich wrote: post #267

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Well said. There are a million starter projects and examples each with a different mix of tools hooked up all in very different ways with tons of files and config. And lots of them with bugs or out of date. The problem with the JS world is they can never coagulate around one solution. Everyone has this insatiable desire to roll their own. Next only works because it leaves out a bunch of stuff. Instead of the examples…

I think a big part of this is because of the the popular teachers and bloggers/youtubers which are not more than undercover (and some not even undercover) marketers for companies or solutions promoting the use of their platforms. So many "Look how easy it is to build a blog with Next.js/Remix/Nuxt.js/Whatever", and it is true. That's really easy and cool and has a really good DX and we all love it. But in real life y…

Thanks for the pointer to adonis.js. I have been playing with just nextjs and nextauth and getting those to play well is a bit of a headache (middleware doesn’t seem to work). I assume an all in one solution stuff has been tested together!

Re: Ask HN: Getting tired of complexity in web development

#286

Post by iamsaitam » Thu, Oct 13, 2022, 11:58 AM UTC

diob wrote: post #65

The weird thing is, having been in frontend dev since around 2013 I feel like it's the simplest it's ever been. I'm more productive than ever, but I suppose mileage varies.

Ditto.

Re: Ask HN: Getting tired of complexity in web development

#287

Post by iamsaitam » Thu, Oct 13, 2022, 12:02 PM UTC

jelan wrote: post #57

A couple people have asked what complexities I’m referring to and mainly what I mean is just how much bloat goes into making anything, and at a higher level the general course of action seems to be to just keep adding to the system until you get what you want out of it instead of trying to fix or improve underlying problems with the web. I know we can’t just pause the internet while everyone comes to a consensus on h…

Web Development is as complicated as you (or the team) makes it. Your issue seems to be with people's choices rather than the ecosystem. Changing to another area won't solve anything for you. Choose the right team for the kind of work you like.

Re: Ask HN: Getting tired of complexity in web development

#288

Post by boxed » Sat, Oct 15, 2022, 10:18 AM UTC

a_bored_husky wrote: post #160

boxed wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've looked at Elixir a bit, but I came away with the expression that it would be a bit like doing Django before 1.7 where I had to do schema migrations manually. This is a huge deal to me. I didn't see any forms libraries either, so the forms situation seems even more primitive. I'm the author of iommi so I now have very high level abstractions for forms/tables/menus/etc, and a transparent way to compose these. I wo…

Fwiw I was afraid of manual migrations too, coming from Django, but its not that terrible once you get used to it. There should be a few form libs out there but I havent needed one so far. Chris McCord said at ElixirConf that there are plans of reworking the forms api to make it work better with LiveView.

I'm not afraid of it. It just seems silly and tedious.

Re: Ask HN: Getting tired of complexity in web development

#289

Post by nymanjon » Sun, Oct 16, 2022, 12:31 AM UTC

I wrote a js lib similar to HTMX, which I call HTMF[1]. Unlike HTMX I try to stay as close to the metal of the current semantics as possible. So, all interactions are based off of forms. I also tried to keep the wording similar to HTML/JS semantics. It's pretty small lib but pretty amazing how far I can get with it. These days I mainly build offline-first apps with it. But I built it in such a way that it can easily be a progressive enhancement to an MPA app.

[1]: https://github.com/jon49/htmf

Re: Ask HN: Getting tired of complexity in web development

#290

Post by ornornor » Sun, Oct 16, 2022, 6:41 PM UTC

globular-toast wrote: post #264

nakatu wrote: post #115

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How is Angular adding just a sprinkle of js to your web app? Isn't the ouput of building an Angular app a full SPA?

I am using the "original" angular-js, not the newer Angular whatever version it is now. It's not a full SPA. I just include angular.js and put the ng stuff in my HTML. Maybe the new Angular is different?

Yes, angular 2 (which means anything after angularJS) is a full on SPA just like react is.

I think stimulus is more like angularJS. But modern angular definitely isn’t.