> Yes. I’m generally against specialization and splitting teams. This of course depends on what type of organization you have and how complex the frontend is. iOS and Android is usually complex as it is so they are typically specialized but I would still keep them in the team.
Right why have someone _good_ at a particular domain who can lead design on a team when you can have a bunch of folks who are just ok at it, and then lack leadership?
> Specialized teams not only creates synchronization issues between teams but also creates different team cultures.
Difference in culture can be cultivated as a benefit. It can allow folks to move between teams in an org and feel different, and it can allow for different experimentation to find success.
> What this does is that it induces a constant time delay for everything the organization does. Because teams no longer can solve an entire feature the organization instead spends more time on moving cards around in the planning tool of choice. The tiniest thing can require massive bureaucratic overhead.
I've seen this true when I was by myself doing every from project management, development, testing, and deployment. Orgs can have multiple steak holders who might throw a flag at any moment or force inefficient processes.
> Solutions also has a tendency to become suboptimal because no technician has an general overview of the problem from start to finish. And it also quite common that the same problem is solved multiple times, for each team.
Generalists can also produce suboptimal solution because they lack a deeper knowledge and XP in a particular domain, like DB, so they tend to reach for an ORM because that's a tool for a generalists.
> By making BFFs specialized, instead of the teams, you don’t need to spend time to create and design a generalized API. How many hours hasn’t been wasted on API design? It adds nothing to customer satisfaction.
Idk what you're trying to claim, but API design should reflect a customers workflow. If it's not, you are doing it wrong. This requires both gathering of info, and design planning.
> This also means that you separate public and private APIs. External consumers should not use the API as your own web client.
Internal and external APIs are OK, this is just a feature of _composability_ in your API stack.
> Specialized BFFs is not only to have a good fit for the client consuming it but it also about giving different views of the same underlying data.
If the workflow is the same, you're basically duplicating more effort than if you just had a thin client for each platform.
> E.g assume we have an article with multiple revisions (edits). Handling revisions is important for the Admin API but for the web client that serves the final version of the article not at all, it shouldn’t even be aware of that the concepts of revisions exists.
Based on what? Many comment systems or articles use an edit notification or similar for correcting info. This is a case by case basis on the product.
> Creating a new a BFF is as easy as copy&paste an existing one. Then you add and remove what you need.
That sounds terrible, and very OO. I'd rather generate another client for my openapi documented API, in whatever language is most appropriate for that client.
> The differences between BFFs is usually how you view your schema (GET). Writing to your model (POST) is likely shared because of constraints.
That's a stretch, if I need a form, I likely need the same data if I'm on iOS, Android, native, or web. Again it's about execution of a workflow.
> What is then different views of the same data? An SQL query (or VIEW). Too many APIs just maps a database table to an endpoint 1:1, those APIs are badly designed because the consequence of that is that the client needs to do an asynchronous HTTP JOIN to get the data it needs, very inefficient.
Yes, those API are not being designed correctly, but I think you said folks are wasting too much time on design, so not sure what your arguing for here other than to not just try and force your clients to do excessive business logic.
> By writing SQL to fit your BFFs you will then realize that the ORM is the main problem of your architecture, it usually the ORM that creates the idea that you only have one view of the same data, one table to one entity. But SQL is a relationship model, you can’t realistically express that with 1:1 only.
Yet ORMs are tools of generalists. I agree they are generally something that can get in the way of a complex data model, but they are fine for like a user management system, or anything else that is easily normalized.
> By removing the ORM you will also solve the majority of your performance issues, two birds one stone scenario.
That depends a lot on how the orm is being used.
> Ownership of a BFF should ideally be by the ones consuming it.
Why? We literally write clients for APIs we don't own all the time, whenever we call out to an external/3p service. Treat your client teams like a client! Make API contracts, version things correctly, communicate.
> iOS and Android can usually use the same BFF, they don’t differ that much to warrant a new BFF. If there are any differences between the two, give them different endpoints within the same BFF for that specific use case. When designing APIs one should be pragmatic, not religious.
The workflows Shou be the same. The main difference between any clients are the inputs available to the user to interact with.
> BFF is nothing more than an adapter in hexagonal architecture.
That's what a client is...