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Why is modern web development so complicated?

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Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#581

Post by anthony_doan »

nfgu wrote: post #105
anthony_doan wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't even use a backend rendering framework? MVC PHP frameworks are very nice and they don't move as fast as those javascript frontend rendering. Also the ORM deals with any security problems and most framework deals with other security deals too including session handling.

You can use rendering libraries, ORMs and session management libraries without a framework. I think it's way nicer. I much prefer environments like Sinatra, Express or Flask than full-blown MVC frameworks.

I did Flask and I thought it was so much work to do a login system and other stuff.

There were so many ways of structuring your codes. I find myself constantly rewriting the code to adapt to a new way of organizing codes.

I personally prefer a somewhat opinionated framework.

But I understand that there is a pro and con and a need for a barebone/slim framework versus a featureful framework.

I actually moved from flask & vuejs 2 from last year to phoenix & jquery.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#582

Post by muzani »

slx26 wrote: post #11
heyoni wrote: post #2

I don't know, but I do know I would rather fix a race condition on a multithreaded application than figure out how flexbox works or even understand all the different parts of the DOM.

Heh. I kinda felt: "hey, I agree with that", so I started asking myself why. What's the difference? Somehow, it looks like the difference is that on one side you have a very complicated problem but in a potentially well defined and bounded environment, and on the other you may have "smaller" problems, but on an environment so vast and complex that's kinda impossible to assert that you are doing things "properly". The…

I think it's the difference between trying to keep a log cabin up and trying to keep a sand castle steady. The sand castle gives so much more anxiety and a fix threatens to break other fixes.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#583

Post by cjfd »

afarrell wrote: post #73
TotempaaltJ wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And here's the trick to not building shit software: don't build shit software. It's a crude way to put it, but the reality is that you can build bad websites in any framework (including old PHP stuff and new JavaScript hype). You can also build good websites in any framework. It depends way more on the organisation or team developing it than on the libraries you use.

The trouble is that "don't build shit software" isn't actionable advice on how to avoid building shit software. For someone seeking to be a more skillful web software engineer, there's no information there.

There may not be actionable advice for someone hiring a software engineer if that person knows nothing about software engineering. However, I would argue that that person is in a bad position no matter what. There is actionable advice for a software engineer here insofar as the general 'shitiness' of software is due to a lack of discipline on the part of the software engineer. Having witnessed inexcusable practices like functions that contain 10000 lines 'don't build shit software' sounds like very much actionable advice to me.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#584

Post by mister_hn »

Well..no one has to switch to React/Vue/etc. You can still deliver well-behaved websites using plain HTML5 (CSS3 + jQuery), without all the bloat taken thanks to npm/yarn. You can try to use SaSS or LeSS, to make your CSS files look neat and avoiding to DRY, but all the rest is pure bloat.

To all the people saying that you want a native-app look, then go for the native way. The web-apps will _NEVER_ be as fast as the native ones, just because, the native ones will be faster and faster as the hardware specs are going up. I personally hate to go through web-development, even if it's a desktop client: stop wrapping around web views.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#585

Post by jdnenej »

MadWombat wrote: post #301
orf wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the tool allows you to shoot yourself in the face without warning, and has a reputation/history of doing it to a lot of other people, then the tooling is indeed the problem.

Most tools out there allow you to shoot yourself in the face. In this case, the guy replaced client-side JavaScript (very notorious for its amazing face shooting abilities) with server-side PHP (also, a very notorious face shooter).

The real metric of quality is does it do what you expected. PHP is a gun that sometimes shoots backwards with no sensible reason where as rust has a gyroscope that can work out when the gun is pointing at your face and requires that you turn off the safety first.

Entire classes of bugs simply don't exist in better languages.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#586

Post by hdfbdtbcdg »

onion2k wrote: post #128
mort96 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Everyone wants a SPA" is such bullshit. GitHub used to just load for a hundred milliseconds and then show me everything I needed; now it loads for a hundred milliseconds and shows me a spinner while it does another roundtrip for some javascript, then parses and executes that giant truckload of code, then does _another_ roundtrip to get the JSON or whatever describing the data I actually want to see, then executes it…

GitHub works without JS just fine. Switch it off. In fact, I'm pretty sure Github is rendered server side for the first load. You shouldn't be seeing any spinners. I'd check if I wasn't on my phone.

Github is annoying. Some pages are SSR some aren't. The js is quite resource hungry so I tend to keep js off for github until I get to a page that needs it.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#587

Post by jdnenej »

asark wrote: post #498
debaserab2 wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder what your brand new greenfield project is going to look like in five years when it's been passed through the hands of a few interns and contractors and survived a couple different ownership shuffles. Think it will look as maintainable as it is today? Or do you think a new consultant will roll through and easily sell the client on another rewrite-from-scratch project?

Framework-dependent projects tend to go stale and become "ew I don't wanna touch that, it's so last year, we should probably replace it with [newer version of framework that's gonna end up being much harder to upgrade than expected / other framework]" surprisingly fast once eyes are off them, in my experience. Without someone competent doing continual upkeep, the next guy/gal's gonna try to sell the re-write anyway.…

Plain JS is the same. How often do you search something and find the 2012 way includes copying a 20 line util function and the latest way has it built in to the language.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#588

Post by jdnenej »

woutr_be wrote: post #522
reaperducer wrote: post #38

It doesn't have to be complicated, if you get support from above. A few weeks ago I launched a new web site for a health care company. HTML, PHP, CSS, and MySQL. No frameworks. No javascript. No garbage. It replaced a site that was a mess of javascript libraries on top of frameworks on top of a half dozen jquery version and on and on and on. The company administrators, doctors, practitioners, etc... are so happy with…

My background is mainly frontend, but I'm well versed in backend as well. I've been actively advocating at my company to stop with this whole separate frontend and backend, and instead just return plain HTML and some basic JavaScript when needed. In most of my personal projects I've been following this approach too, and I must say, I'm so much more productive. I don't find myself constantly switching between browser-…

I built a SPA and found making the API and linking everything up to be needless overhead. The way I find works best is using rails templates to simply insert a div with all the data needed in the attributes and then having react render everything.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#589

Post by johnisgood »

Roboprog wrote: post #513
FussyZeus wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, if all you're doing is showing and hiding a mobile menu, you can do that in a really expanded form in like 5 lines of vanilla JS, and not have your user download 90 KB* of crap. *And you BETTER be using the minified version for production.

90 KB is probably bad for a marketing page, but it’s nothing for a B2B or internal use app, particularly when the second use is just the “you already have it” HTTP header response. Good or bad depending on context.

Is bloat sometimes a good thing?

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#590

Post by johnisgood »

buzzerbetrayed wrote: post #285
chrshawkes wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not being hostile, I apologize if you took it that way. I'm just making a point about how so many dev's claim to have the right answer until you need to rely on them to get something done. Projects turn to a mess mostly due to things one single person cannot control. I don't know a single person, including myself, who've thought that their code didn't look like shit 6 months to a year down the road. I think we al…

> I apologize if you took it that way Placing the blame on him when you were the one being hostile is hostile.

He did just apologize in case that person perceived something hostile when it was not meant to be hostile. He should not have apologized it seems. Damned if you do, damned if you do not.
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