371–380 of 637 posts
State is probably the main factor why you would like to do this. I can agree on that SPAs are used in some places where they don't fit (mostly content heavy sites). But they are not a mistake.
I think one of the unsolved problems of client-side interactivity on websites is how difficult it is to add it just a little bit of extra client-side functionality to a traditional server rendered website. For example, recently I had to deal with photo uploads on a Rails app, which works fine out of the box at first, until you want to show progress bars and uploaded previews etc. Then you add a couple of client-side…
Phoenix LiveView really does solve a lot of these problems.
I happen to really like, React, Redux, Material UI, etc... ymmv.
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> And most of them don't spend the time to implement HTML5 history properly, so they break the URLs - which means you can't bookmark or deep link into them and they break the back/forward buttons. The majority of routers for React, and other SPA frameworks, do this out of the box. This has been a solved problem for half a decade at least. A website has to go out of its way to mess this up. That aside, SPAs are great…
> 1. You aren't mixing state across server and client. Single Source of Truth is a thing for a good reason. If you have a stateful backend, and your front end naturally has the state of whatever the user has input, you now have to work to keep those two in sync. If this were true, you wouldn't need a REST API. I don't understand what you're trying to say here. When you make a REST call to get data, you instantly have…
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> And most of them don't spend the time to implement HTML5 history properly, so they break the URLs - which means you can't bookmark or deep link into them and they break the back/forward buttons. The majority of routers for React, and other SPA frameworks, do this out of the box. This has been a solved problem for half a decade at least. A website has to go out of its way to mess this up. That aside, SPAs are great…
> You aren't mixing state across server and client. Single Source of Truth is a thing for a good reason. If you have a stateful backend, and your front end naturally has the state of whatever the user has input, you now have to work to keep those two in sync. This is a bit weird to me, in that I'd say that cuts in the opposite direction. State can exist in at least three locations for most applications: db, app serve…
This really just comes down to what you're writing, how app-like your web app is. It's too easy to have one's own experience focused in a certain area and estimate the remaining majority as relatively similar. (For most of what I personally work on, the DB portion is mostly a simple straightforward serialization of what the user has built through the application; whereas client-side state has so many aspects to it I couldn't give a brief characterization—the whole app is basically client-side.)
From what I can tell most of the disagreement about SPAs results from devs who are building things that aren't app-like railing against their futility vs devs who are, who become perplexed by the vitriol when they have immediate experience with their architectural benefits.
It's been so frustrating watch this play out over the past decade. I keep seeing projects that could have been written as a traditional multi-page application pick an SPA architecture instead, with the result that they take 2-5 times longer to build and produce an end-result that's far slower to load and much more prone to bugs. Inevitably none of these projects end up taking advantage of the supposed benefits of SPA…
> And most of them don't spend the time to implement HTML5 history properly, so they break the URLs - which means you can't bookmark or deep link into them and they break the back/forward buttons. The majority of routers for React, and other SPA frameworks, do this out of the box. This has been a solved problem for half a decade at least. A website has to go out of its way to mess this up. That aside, SPAs are great…
1. A good server-generated-HTML backend will have no more state than a good server-generated-JSON backend. The client state is all stored in the client either way, whether in JS variables, HTML tags, or the URL.
2. A good server-generated-HTML backend doesn't do significantly more work just because its output is in HTML instead of JSON. A bit of extra text generated isn't going to increase your CPU load in any meaningful way.
3. There are only fewer languages to deal with if you aren't in charge of writing backend code. If you're in charge of the backend code, you still have to pick a backend language for your JSON API.
I think you're assuming that the choice is "SPA" or "messy stateful monstrosity". It's perfectly possible to build a RESTful HTML-based API that is as clean and stateless as any JSON API. PHP's been starting each request with a clean slate for decades.
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ok dont look up how long grid layout has existed in wpf
Who cares? (I know btw I used to be a C# engineer in my previous life - I actually first used WPF when it was still beta) Here and now, WPF is much worse. Even Microsoft itself now invests into React Native.
Microsoft invests in React Native as they want to bring applications built in React Native for iOS and Android to Windows.
The fact they are investing in React Native doesn't necessarily mean much more than the fact that they want developers to compile their React Native apps to Windows as well as the mobile platforms.
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> And most of them don't spend the time to implement HTML5 history properly, so they break the URLs - which means you can't bookmark or deep link into them and they break the back/forward buttons. The majority of routers for React, and other SPA frameworks, do this out of the box. This has been a solved problem for half a decade at least. A website has to go out of its way to mess this up. That aside, SPAs are great…
"A website has to go out of its way to mess this up." I know it's supposed to be easier, but I keep seeing teams mess this up.
I think a part of this is that a lot of developers simply don't desire, want to, get to or otherwise take the time to understand the framework they are using... It has been true forever... I can't tell you how many times I've seen stuff copy/pasted from StackOverflow, by devs that don't understand what they're doing, or they add jQuery to a React application, and have goofy interactions.
The lack of understanding will always be a thing, you have to learn, most learn by doing, and when starting out, you don't know that what you are doing isn't good, but it kind-of works.
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I don't see template operations as imperative, rather I see them as declarative: you write the HTML and declare lists/placeholders inside the HTML. You also don't generally do much with the data except insert it into HTML; the rest of the backend is responsible for fetching/etc the data.
Yeah, but the function itself doesn't return that view. The framework you're working in essentially composes the view based on the associated code and template. This is fundamentally different from just returning the view itself in the function. These are all declarative approaches, but leaving your view in code is a lot better. Every template-based framework I've seen has involved a lot of magic, syntax and DSL. Tha…
These days.. I just an Amrita like engine I've built myself and I just use elements directly in the document. It only takes 40 lines of code to match child elements to data model items and fill in the template. Your browser already has a powerful parser and literal templates built in.. why invent a whole new language just for HTML templates?
I've never been able to fully apprehend the reasoning for JSX.