This entire product should just be a rails/laravel/django app with a mysql db hosted on a single server
Or C# and SQL Server. Easy peasy.
If you wanted to get fancier, feed a message queue into Azure Functions for the services.
Overthinking it and the value of simple solutions (2019)
31–40 of 58 posts
Re: Overthinking it and the value of simple solutions (2019)
#32I shudder to think about the amount of man hours wasted on a relatively simple website that has been completely over-engineered with the likes of React and/or Angular JS when a simple server side MVC framework and a bit of jQuery could have sufficed. The industry is rife with people that instead of looking at a problem and choosing the appropriate tech to solve the problem. They choose the technology and then try to…
It's a statement I see regularly on HN and that confuses me. Something like Next.js gives you the power and structure of React while doing a great job of hiding any complexity under the hood. And it scales really well, whether you need a complex website or just a set of static pages. I'm not sure why jQuery is mentioned either. It was popular when I started programming but fell out favour when its major functionaliti…
> 'm not sure why jQuery is mentioned either. It was popular when I started programming but fell out favour when its major functionalities were implemented in ECMAScript.
less than a year ago I was doing Magento, yea, jQuery is still there.
Now working on an already established Angular web and hybrid mobile apps, I saw jQuery symbol, and immediately checked it in the source, really surprised to see it there
Re: Overthinking it and the value of simple solutions (2019)
#33I shudder to think about the amount of man hours wasted on a relatively simple website that has been completely over-engineered with the likes of React and/or Angular JS when a simple server side MVC framework and a bit of jQuery could have sufficed. The industry is rife with people that instead of looking at a problem and choosing the appropriate tech to solve the problem. They choose the technology and then try to…
Yes! Time to drop all those React/Angular/Vue… frontend tech!
Let's go back to good old Javascript, dividing pages weight by 100, no npm, no complex rendering. We're wasting time in those tech, maybe Facebook needs it in some specific cases, but a large majority of the websites just need simple JS.
Re: Overthinking it and the value of simple solutions (2019)
#34I shudder to think about the amount of man hours wasted on a relatively simple website that has been completely over-engineered with the likes of React and/or Angular JS when a simple server side MVC framework and a bit of jQuery could have sufficed. The industry is rife with people that instead of looking at a problem and choosing the appropriate tech to solve the problem. They choose the technology and then try to…
Over time requirements and feature sets tend to grow, and if those features include client-side updates, with enough time you'll end up with jQuery Spaghetti, which is exactly what happened to many server-side render web applications built in the years preceding the early 2010s.
Well I would argue that is because many of the developers writing those weren't really JavaScript developers. It is quite easy to keep things tidy if you just keep to some basic JavaScript patterns which aren't very different than some of the patterns promoted on the server side.
The problem is that JavaScript just isn't that well understood and this is partially because superficially it looks very similar to C# and Java.
Re: Overthinking it and the value of simple solutions (2019)
#35I shudder to think about the amount of man hours wasted on a relatively simple website that has been completely over-engineered with the likes of React and/or Angular JS when a simple server side MVC framework and a bit of jQuery could have sufficed. The industry is rife with people that instead of looking at a problem and choosing the appropriate tech to solve the problem. They choose the technology and then try to…
It's a statement I see regularly on HN and that confuses me. Something like Next.js gives you the power and structure of React while doing a great job of hiding any complexity under the hood. And it scales really well, whether you need a complex website or just a set of static pages. I'm not sure why jQuery is mentioned either. It was popular when I started programming but fell out favour when its major functionaliti…
In the past most websites were Rendered HTML from a language such as PHP / Java / C# / Perl and then they had a small amount of JavaScript over the top for interactivity and client side form validation i.e. when you submitted a form a full postback to the server was made. jQuery bridged the browser compatibility problem that existed at time. So most sites were built using jQuery + Server side MVC framework + SQL Database. Overtime more and more logic was pushed onto the client side (mostly updates via AJAX) and eventually JavaScript MVC frameworks were written to deal with the extra complexity. Angular / React etc are just the latest incarnation of these.
However much of the JavaScript written on those sites was done by back end programmers who didn't really understand jQuery or JavaScript and thus you ended up with jQuery spagetti code which others have lamented about. However if you were proficient with JavaScript at the time you could use a few JavaScript patterns and keep everything fairly clean.
This architecture while dated works incredibly well (minus the jQuery spagetti) for quite a few web applications. This includes everything from shopping sites, bespoke CRUD apps, Forms etc. However it isn't cool, it doesn't look as good on your CV and you actually have to really understand what you are doing to keep it performant.
Re: Overthinking it and the value of simple solutions (2019)
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a statement I see regularly on HN and that confuses me. Something like Next.js gives you the power and structure of React while doing a great job of hiding any complexity under the hood. And it scales really well, whether you need a complex website or just a set of static pages. I'm not sure why jQuery is mentioned either. It was popular when I started programming but fell out favour when its major functionaliti…
In the past most websites were Rendered HTML from a language such as PHP / Java / C# / Perl and then they had a small amount of JavaScript over the top for interactivity and client side form validation i.e. when you submitted a form a full postback to the server was made. jQuery bridged the browser compatibility problem that existed at time. So most sites were built using jQuery + Server side MVC framework + SQL Data…
still unsure i follow. i must be missing something... react does not prevent anyone from using jquery afaik. in fact, anyone can go ahead and use jquery with react if they want.
react is doing what php did a while ago (and is still doing). it's mixing frontend with backend stuff. i personally find it refreshing!
we did that for a while then people came and told us how bad it was and we needed to do strict MVC or whatnot. now everybody is doing it and it's cool again!
Re: Overthinking it and the value of simple solutions (2019)
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nobody cares how the pie is made. They simply want pie. When it comes to new tech and frameworks, those who pay don't care if use React, Angular or Svelte. They only want a working product that provides value for money. Losing business has little to do with the technology that's being used or sold, it has everything to do with the problem that the business intends to solve or the need it intends to cater. And how wel…
”Nobody cares how the pie is made. They simply want pie. When it comes to new tech and frameworks, those who pay don't care if use React, Angular or Svelte. They only want a working product that provides value for money.” When paying nobody cares about the tech. When hiring, all they care about is the tech.
Hence the cognitive dissonance I was mentioning in my initial reply.
Re: Overthinking it and the value of simple solutions (2019)
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the past most websites were Rendered HTML from a language such as PHP / Java / C# / Perl and then they had a small amount of JavaScript over the top for interactivity and client side form validation i.e. when you submitted a form a full postback to the server was made. jQuery bridged the browser compatibility problem that existed at time. So most sites were built using jQuery + Server side MVC framework + SQL Data…
still unsure i follow. i must be missing something... react does not prevent anyone from using jquery afaik. in fact, anyone can go ahead and use jquery with react if they want. react is doing what php did a while ago (and is still doing). it's mixing frontend with backend stuff. i personally find it refreshing! we did that for a while then people came and told us how bad it was and we needed to do strict MVC or what…
> still unsure i follow. i must be missing something... react does not prevent anyone from using jquery afaik. in fact, anyone can go ahead and use jquery with react if they want.
React / Angular JS etc tend to require spending a lot of time learning how it works first. Then you have to build almost all your application around it. This can take a lot of time, which pushed up costs and complexity. If you are building something like Google Docs or Google Maps you want to build it like a SPA. For a lot of the sites I've worked on in the past building it as a SPA was completely unnecessary.
> react is doing what php did a while ago (and is still doing). it's mixing frontend with backend stuff. i personally find it refreshing!
We've been trying to get away from that for quite a while. I try to write almost all my JavaScript in a way that assumes as little as possible about the page structure, the web application etc. It can be done, however it requires thinking about how your markup works and how the page works.
Generally you should have good separation between your markup, your styling and your scripts.
> we did that for a while then people came and told us how bad it was and we needed to do strict MVC or whatnot. now everybody is doing it and it's cool again!
The problem is that it is cool again. I don't want my backend code tied to my front end code.
Re: Overthinking it and the value of simple solutions (2019)
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree. Most of my colleagues think I am quite a decent JavaScript programmer, but because I haven't got much commercial experience with React or Angular it is quite difficult to find a JavaScript role.
You can learn any framework and get good at even while on a project, in just a couple of months. The problem is that there are too many things to learn in terms of tooling and frameworks all the time making you have less time/bandwidth for the actual domain problems which are why you have the said job. Getting good is one thing and becoming an expert is another. Because these frameworks lifetimes you don’t want to be…
The problem I have with many of the modern frameworks is the tutorials is extremely simple or they are far too advanced.
Also there is a lot of jargon around each frameworks. So a lot of the time, I just give up and go back to jQuery, Handlebars and event delegation as that does 90% of what I need.
Re: Overthinking it and the value of simple solutions (2019)
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't really understand why we have decided that static html pages need to have a TLS certificate
Well for one thing it prevents ISPs from injecting ads (or worse) into sites.
But then how is Comcast supposed to tell me I'm about to go over my monthly data cap?