If Not SPAs, What?

https://macwright.com/2020/10/28/if-not-spas.html

by todsacerdoti • 6 years ago

364 448 6 years ago

ng124• 6 years ago

If you can do server side great: do it. The difficulty is accurately predicting how much JavaScript you'll end up writing. If your client-side JavaScript is comparable in complexity to your SSR you'll eventually end up with the worst of both worlds.

mattmanser2• 6 years ago

Is it really that difficult?

If a client tells me what they want built, I bet I'd be able to roughly guess how much js there's going to be, probably within a few hundred lines for a, say, 3 month project.

The larger the project, the large the margin of error, but still, it's really not that hard for the vast majority of work we do. Or at least I do, e-commerce, enterprise apps, etc.

sgarman• 6 years ago

That sounds logical if you are doing client work with a defined scope. From personal experience working in the startup world, which I imagine a lot of posters on here are, you don't always know what you are building or what the end game is.

blakehaswell• 6 years ago

I'm not sure that's such a huge problem. HTTP routing provides a wonderful architectural seam so that we can use different solutions for different domains like `/profile` and `/document-editor`. We can create rich client-side experiences without creating a monolithic SPA. And as long as we make sure we have those architectural seams we have the flexibility to decide.

ng124• 6 years ago

Organizing my HTML into pages is the easy part. The hard part is the rich client-side experience: things like building a sortable/filterable table with a rich datetime picker where the data is displayed dynamically in a chart with zoom/pan capabilities. That's why I build SPAs: I've already bit the bullet to get highly dynamic client-side code, it's just as easy to construct my pages client-side as well.

jimbob45• 6 years ago

An actual app? I’d love for container-sandboxed native apps to make their “comeback”.

EGreg2• 6 years ago

I am going to advocate the other way:

https://qbix.com/blog/2020/01/02/the-case-for-building-clien...

skoskie3• 6 years ago

Server is timing out.

E: Actually it might just be a really heavy page. It’s a disaster on mobile.

E2: After a few refreshes, it seems to be loading normally.

EGreg2• 6 years ago

It was submitted to HN at the time What do you think of the substance?

randompwd4• 6 years ago

The fan on my thin laptop are nearly always on when browsing the web. Something that wasnt the case even 3 years ago.

Too much JS being executed on every page.

kqvamxurcagg• 6 years ago

Having mostly used Angular and React with APIs, I recently wrote a small app with server-side templating and a very small amount of jquery. It was an absolute joy. Especially with webpack it feels like the front-end has become needlessly complex and I'm not sure it has improved quality for users.

k__3• 6 years ago

Isn't Next.js (and in turn React, on which Next is built) the answer to that question?

It can do client side rendering, server side rendering, and static site genration.

yokto• 6 years ago

It was my first thought, but mope. Read the article and check out a few of the mentioned frameworks, it's eye opening.

k__3• 6 years ago

I did.

I know the other frameworks and to me they all seem to have given up and go back to SSR.

I'm much more interested in what's coming from the Snowpack/Skypack direction.

xiaomai• 6 years ago

I think Phoenix Live View is maybe the most compelling story around this (https://github.com/phoenixframework/phoenix_live_view). I'm moving a side-project from React/SPA to Phoenix live view and it's kind of amazing to get the dev ergonomics of a server-rendered page with the UX benefits of a SPA.

This course is a pretty great intro: https://pragmaticstudio.com/phoenix-liveview

basch• 6 years ago

as a user, this is the kind of experience I want on the web. any spa like page should always degrade back to web standards. and it should be lightening fast. and not spin my cpu fan or warm my desk.

WillPostForFood2• 6 years ago

Yes, and please no more load screens for a page of text a few photos, (looking at you Blogger), just send the text and links to the photos.

brightball2• 6 years ago

Agree completely. My only concern is that so many imitations are attempting to pop up in other languages and you just can’t do it as effectively.

There are so many tradeoffs present that happen to result in the necessary set of functionality to do this efficiently that aren’t easily present outside of the BEAM.

neolog• 6 years ago

What about this can't be done with async/await?

sixhobbits• 6 years ago

I started this course and the animations/presentation are amazing. some really clear explanations. But the fake cute-sy dialogue and the extra fluff that says how wonderful and amazing and great and FUN liveview is means I didn't get past the first video

dnautics2• 6 years ago

Having deployed liveview for an admin dashboard, I gotta say, it really is great FUN, and no-fuss, even if you're slinging together a system that customers never see so you don't care if the code gets a bit knotty, and your datastructures are abjectly awful.

AlchemistCamp2• 6 years ago

I liked their Tetris videos, which I watched the first several of.

That said, if you want a different approach then check out my series at https://alchemist.camp/tagged/Reactor

I covered the whole process of building the site for my podcast https://reactor.am in the series.

Note that LiveView still isn't at v1.0 and breaking updates have been common. You'll have a much better with my LV tutorial or anyone else's if you use the exact same library versions we do and upgrade at the same point the tutorial does.

PopeDotNinja• 6 years ago

What is Live View not good at?

AlchemistCamp2• 6 years ago

It's not suitable for using the client's computer to mine crypto currencies, doing graphics processing on the client, doing numerical processing on the client or doing anything purely on the client without server interaction.

For things where you generally need a trip to the server anyway, like validations, it's great.

thejosh• 6 years ago

You wouldn't use it for an offline app, but that's not what it's being marketed towards.

dugmartin2• 6 years ago

I've been playing with LiveView myself for personal projects and it is very nice.

One interesting thing is that it makes you consider memory issues again since all your rendered data structures are held in memory in the LiveView process unless they are explicitly cleared after the render with "temporary_assigns". For apps that would have to hold and transfer a lot of data up and down the channel I've ended up using a hybrid of LiveView with divs set to phx-update="ignore" in which I mount React components.

mercer19• 6 years ago

I'd say that's the main (potential) 'problem' with LiveView, alongside latency issues.

In practice, I've usually found that the advantages outweigh the disadvantages when it comes to the former. Beefing up my servers seems like a worthwhile trade-off.

When it comes to latency, or related issues, I find that I'm still so much better off using LV as a basis and 'dropping down' into plain JS or (p)react when I need it.

We recently delivered a project that involved a whole bunch of stuff that LV was a perfect solution for, but also a core bit of functionality that required various kinds of animations. We ended up using LV wherever we could, and piggy-backed on the LV channel (websockets) to handle synchronizing the animation stuff. The actual code to animate things was just plain old JS. Worked like a charm!

te_chris2• 6 years ago

We’ve gone all in and are using it a lot in production. There is one big trade off to consider though: point of presence and global availability. We’re ok, as we’re a UK based website and hosted in GCP europe-west2, but we had devs in NZ for a while, and they said that, understandably, the site was really slow for them due to the latency. Beam has the ability to link instances and have them cluster, so you could do something like that across multiple regions globally, but there is a trade off to consider if you run a global service: you’re trading an over engineering and sync problem, for a potential distributed systems problem if you try and make the same liveview site available performantly in multiple global regions.

dodyg• 6 years ago

Blazor Server (https://dotnet.microsoft.com/apps/aspnet/web-apps/blazor) is similar. It's a very productive environment.

tor291674• 6 years ago

Can't believe this didn't get mentioned in the article.

nickjj3• 6 years ago

It's still not a silver bullet. There's lots of things in a LV driven app where you're still wondering what front-end library to use with it.

Typically you wouldn't use LV to handle:

Menu dropdowns, tooltips, popovers, modals (in some cases), tabs (when you don't want to load the content from the server) or things that change the client side state of something but don't adjust server state. That could be things like a "select all" checkbox toggle where that doesn't do anything on its own other than select or de-select client side check boxes or toggling the visibility of something. There's also things like wanting to copy to the clipboard or initiating stuff to happen on drag / drop (like animations).

Basically you'll still find yourself wanting to use JS with LV. Whether that's Stimulus, Alpine, Vue, jQuery, vanilla JS or something else that's up to you. But I do find most of the above necessary in a lot of web apps I develop.

mercer19• 6 years ago

It's still not a silver bullet. There's lots of things in a LV driven app where you're still wondering what front-end library to use with it.
Typically you wouldn't use LV to handle:
Menu drop dropdowns, tooltips, popovers, modals (in some cases), tabs (when you don't want to load the content from the server) or things that change the client side state of something but don't adjust server state.

My experience is that LiveView is fine for all but the last use case. And while in practice I often don't really need to keep things client-side-only, when I do it's often pretty easy to just write a bit of js and, if necessary, use hooks and events to communicate with the surrounding LiveView(s).

In fact, I vaguely recall that in the early days of LV, the creator himself argued that it should be used for just 'smaller interactive stuff'. Over time, we all discovered that LV does surprisingly well for SPA-type use cases (and as a result we now have stuff like router-level LiveViews (that take over the whole page), live_redirects, url updating, and so on).

That could be things like a "select all" checkbox toggle where that doesn't do anything on its own other than select or de-select client side check boxes.

Why wouldn't you just keep that within the server-side state LV paradigm? I've done just that in a project I'm working on.

There's also things like wanting to copy to the clipboard or initiating stuff to happen on drag / drop (like animations).

For those things you write js, yes.

Basically you'll still find yourself wanting to use JS with LV. Whether that's Stimulus, Alpine, jQuery, vanilla JS or something else that's up to you. But I do find most of the above necessary in a lot of web apps I develop.

Absolutely, but I'm continuously surprised how little of it I need, and how often I /think/ I do just because I haven't quite wrapped my head around the different paradigm.

edem• 6 years ago

Is this similar to Vaadin?

stevebmark3• 6 years ago

The future is Next.js with SSR first and selective client side hydration. Ignore the jamstack, it's going to lose and go away. Requiring a JS download first to show a dynamic site is a recipe for bad performance.

Griffinsauce• 6 years ago

Isn't SSR (or even better SSG) the M in JAM? It's a marketing term anyway and it doesn't really need to "lose", we can just talk about the technologies instead.

Next.js gives you a great toolbag to choose from for each challenge, it's definitely going to stay around and keep growing like crazy.

k__3• 6 years ago

I thought so too.

JAMStack is Next.js with SSG+CSR.

stevebmark3• 6 years ago

I believe the M is static HTML, not dynamic SSR HTML

eyelidlessness2• 6 years ago

I would also prefer something like Next.js with partial hydration. But what I want in that is probably a much bigger ask: I want the partial hydration to be performed automatically with static analysis. Something like Svelte (real DOM codegen, no need to ship a library to the browser) would be especially nice, but I don’t want to give up JSX. In the end, this is probably well outside the scope of a framework coupled directly with React, and I suspect that if I want it badly enough it’s something I’ll need to build myself.

stevebmark3• 6 years ago

I'm not sure if we're saying the same thing, by partial hydration I mean only wiring some specific client side components for interactivity. As in only shipping the react components over the wire that need to be rendered on the client for user interaction. Meaning the overall page is vanilla HTML, but some subtrees are React wired components. Complete with state management that can work between all of them. In which case I'm thinking it would be fine to mark components individually as server/client.

gherkinnn2• 6 years ago

You can use much of the J and the A during the SSG stage that then delivers the M to the user. And very user-specific and/or dynamic things will have to remain some sort of generated shell and the content fetched on the client anyway.

JAM has other problems. I don't think that's one.

esistgut• 6 years ago

I am currently working on projects with Django (jinja2), Laravel (blade), Node (ejs) and Next. I can't possibly understand how so many people in this thread are preferring server rendering frameworks. As soon as you have a non hello world application (= complex state shared across multiple components / page) a SPA application is so much easier and productive. And Next brings this experience back to public facing frontends because it supports prerendering along other things.

zmmmmm• 6 years ago

My argument for SPAs rests on the completely subjective yet I feel incredibly powerful impact of latency. When anything takes more than 50ms to react, it becomes mentally jarring to the user. Whether it is typing in an SSH session, clicking a menu with a mouse, auto-completing a box, etc - all these things generate a completely different human response and relationship with the application if they get below that threshold of latency. In my experience, it's nearly impossible to get non-SPAs across that threshold for large sections of their functionality, while for SPAs it becomes more or less the default. So people can make all the technical arguments they want, but to me the human factor of that subjective feeling trumps it all.

cblconfederate3• 6 years ago

That's not possible for SPAs outside localhost. Every single SPA i know is clunky, including gmail which is probably one of the most barebones. The lack of visual indication that something is happening or downloading alone is infuriating with SPAs. Most of them reinvent the browser in a very poor substitute that invariably fails to both be practical , and to mimic a native mobile app (i think the latter is the reason for so many SPAs.

Almost never had a problem with HN either

dralley• 6 years ago

including gmail which is probably one of the most barebones.

And yet, it still uses 130 flipping megabytes of RAM, more than Youtube does, as well as more CPU than Youtube does at idle, as well as requiring several seconds to "start up" when first opening a tab. Ridiculous.

buzzerbetrayed3• 6 years ago

SPAs are like CGI.. you only notice it when it is bad. I can assure you, you use many SPAs that are not slow and clunky, you just don't realize they are SPAs

nullsense2• 6 years ago

I thought 100ms was basically the threshold for feeling "instant"?

But totally agree with your position on this in general!

TeMPOraL6• 6 years ago

It's a crap threshold. 100ms is 10 FPS. You can most definitely tell when something is updating at 10 FPS, vs. 20 FPS (50ms). Movement stops being jarring at ~30 FPS (33.3ms), but you can most definitely tell apart that and 60FPS (16.6ms).

statenjason• 6 years ago

Displaying a loading spinner in under 50ms while waiting for a 500ms request to complete doesn't necessarily build a strong relationship.

SPAs can start off with the good intention of being low-latency and responsive. But when you're backed by a web server, you still have to account for it though optimistic rendering, prefetching, and loading states. Getting it right can be an excellent UX, but it's easy to get very wrong.

swagasaurus-rex• 6 years ago

Most of these SPAs you speak about have loading spinners, grayed-out placeholders, all sorts of tricks to make it feel like you're in control while the fetch() roundtrip to populate the page data completes. The borders of your screen may not change, but the page filling with elements after a delay can be just as jarring.

If a non-SPA page loads near instantaneously because the client-side rendering isn't bloated, it can feel just as good as an SPA with spinners.

You can also use tools like turbolinks the author recommended, to turn your non-SPA into an SPA.

pier255• 6 years ago

When anything takes more than 50ms to react, it becomes mentally jarring to the user.

Depends.

Pressing a key and not seeing a character in less than 50-100ms, yeah, it's quite frustrating.

Clicking on a link and waiting for the content to load? Not so much.

WillPostForFood2• 6 years ago

When anything takes more than 50ms to react, it becomes mentally jarring to the user

Yes, but you often pay a huge penalty on the first page load, which for many use cases is the most important. I'd be so happy with a turbolinks version of GMail.

cercatrova2• 6 years ago

Use the basic HTML version of Gmail, you can set it to be default.

arcturus173• 6 years ago

I've designed and programmed highly interactive SPAs for customers large and small, and the reaction is invariably "I can't believe this is a website, it feels like an app". Being non-technical, they can't put their finger on it, but I know that while the base design plays a part, so does the concrete UI implementation.

I wonder how many of the people crapping on SPAs are actual front-end or full-stack app devs, or otherwise people developing very close to the UX.

I'm sure there are some disgruntled UX devs who are running back to SSR, but when I come to the bimonthly "SPA sucks" thread on HN, for the most part it feels to me as though the critiques are coming from people for whom UX and front-end development are secondary concerns.

blueblisters• 6 years ago

Being non-technical, they can't put their finger on it

This is an interesting perspective. To me, SPAs blur the line between what's happening locally and server-side, so my impatience with slow functions on an SPA page is much greater than the same thing happening on a SSR page. Maybe it's just my conditioning to expect things on a single page to work much quicker as opposed to moving between pages.

IMO, well-designed SPAs should make use of the context-switching function of a complete page fetch in situations where the user might need to wait a relatively longer time for something to load instead of loading bars/spinners.

timw4mail2• 6 years ago

Yet, my experience is that it makes more sense to just implement those features that need more interactivity on the frontend.

It's incredibly wasteful to do a SPA for one autocomplete field, or one map widget, etc. HTML delivered directly to the browser is very responsive.

candiddevmike5• 6 years ago

Our app (https://domestica.app/login) is a pretty good (IMO) example of a blazing fast SPA. It uses Mithril and copious amounts of chunking to make the bundle size extremely small.

vmception2• 6 years ago

while breaking my back button

nothing to do with the SPA of course

candiddevmike5• 6 years ago

Which part breaks your back button?

sebmellen• 6 years ago

This is one of the worst SPAs I've ever seen, simply because it causes an infinite redirect loop when clicking the back button and/or tampers with the browser history to make using the back button impossible.

mattmanser2• 6 years ago

Just tried the app and immediately found the typical SPA bugs and quirks:

- tried to add a recipe and nothing happened for so long (3-5 seconds) that I thought it was broken. Then suddenly the add recipe form finally appeared. Blazing fast! On your dev laptop maybe.

- click payee, nothing happens. URL changes though. God I hate SPAs

- adding an item to your shopping list causes a 'item added' popup to appear. Over the add item button so you can't add another item without dismissing the popup. It's probably only an issue on mobilr, but this popup is only necessary because it's a SPA

- I'm on the 'create shopping category page'. Try and click the 3 dot thing in the top right. The new menu appears underneath the body of the page...

- on the recipe page, you can click the M? button and it displays a link about 'markdown'. Click the link, it takes you to a blank page, which then redirects back to the homepage after a second or two. Bye-bye all your existing input

- this is more of a bug, but if you try and use markdown in the directions text box for recipes, you can't. Start with a # and all your input just disappears (Firefox mobile)

A few other comments I'd add:

- Get a designer, or maybe buy an off the shelf design. That green is err, not nice. The design looks like a developer made it. I'm not great either but you can get a decent design, based on bootstrap or whatever, for like $50 and just adapt it. There are even free designsz like AdminLTE

- why are the top corners of the input boxes rounded, but the bottom corners square?

- Every time I go to the login screen, the logo pops in later than the rest of the screen. And then the Google login pops in even later. I'm on my mobile so can't check, but that screams bad browser cache settings on your images/static assets

- why are the + buttons slightly elliptical instead of round? Looks odd

I generally like the idea behind the app though, though won't use it as it's all in $s. I wonder how much traction you're going to get though as it's going to be really intensive setting it all up

sharatvir• 6 years ago

This page breaks the back button on mobile safari and Firefox

randompwd4• 6 years ago

Just loaded the initial page;no other action - 105 requests, 4 MB(2 on the wire).

Was your comment just an attempt at some growth hacking?

dnautics2• 6 years ago

they also wholeheartedly embrace the thing everyone tries to avoid: mutable state on the server.

For most apps in Phoenix LiveView, it's probably best to think of this as a "relatively smart caching layer". Keeping state on the client invokes distributed state concens anyways, and in the case of the Phoenix, at least the VM is well-equipped with the relevant primitives to make distributed state easy, especially. Basically the only cost you have to pay is if latency is a big deal, you are making a trip back and forth to the server, which could be 100s of milliseconds or more in bad situations... Or even really bad situations, like driving under a tunnel, or being in some stretches of subway.

merb• 6 years ago

well there is also React.NET which actually can use razor pages to include react components. pretty neat. also there is blazor which works with websockets and pushes html to clients.

ckorhonen• 6 years ago

I used Turbolinks for the first time on a new Rails app about 2 years ago and was floored by the impact - it felt like a SPA in terms of no page loads and overall speed.

I'm convinced that this is the solution for the majority of use-cases, combined with selective usage of either React components or something like Stimulus where you need more sophisticated UI components.

ForHackernews2• 6 years ago

Is there an equivalent of Turbolinks for something like Django? Or even for MVC PHP apps?

deefour• 6 years ago

Turbolinks isn't specific to rails.

bojanz• 6 years ago

If you're a Laravel user you'll want to look into Inertia.js[1].

[1] https://inertiajs.com/

raihansaputra• 6 years ago

As mentioned, you can use Turbolinks with django. There's also Intercooler/htmx, and Unpoly.

gremlinsinc2• 6 years ago

most people using livewire on laravel also use turbolinks, it's just a javascript plugin, it's not rails specific.

rogem002• 6 years ago

You can use Turbolinks on any front end project (I use it on my static sites), it has a standalone JS library.

midrus• 6 years ago

Unpoly

https://unpoly.com/

treis2• 6 years ago

The missing link, IMHO, is the lack of client side SQL and a sync mechanism. IndexDB is okay, but nobody is going to use it server side. So you kind of always have to end up writing things twice.

nullsense2• 6 years ago

You want a web browser talking directly to an RDBMS of some kind?

treis2• 6 years ago

Yes, like we had with WebSQL until it was deprecated. Basically a SQLite db per site.

rolae2• 6 years ago

Meteor.js maybe, not sure of its focus nowaday, back when I played around with it, you had basically a MongoDB that you could query and mutate on the client, everything was then synced via a pub/sub system with the server.

dfabulich• 6 years ago

IMO, TurboLinks + service workers are the way to go.

Not many people know this, but a service worker (previously called "local server") allows you to run a little web server in the user's browser that intercepts requests to your own web site. (There's no open IP port.)

The service-worker web server can proxy requests to the remote server, and even build/store entire pages on the client side, enabling offline support. Service workers also have access to a local database, IndexedDB, running in the user's browser.

You can build a very fast web experience this way. You can easily cache individual pieces of a web page and glue them all together.

For example, you can easily implement server-side includes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Side_Includes or edge-side includes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edge_Side_Includes but running on a server that's running on the client.

untog2• 6 years ago

Strongly agreed that service workers have a ton of potential here. But I’m still waiting for there to be some kind of killer framework that crosses the bridge between worker and window, saving lots of main thread processing, etc... MessageChannels are quite low level so I imagine it would need some abstraction. But still, very powerful. I’m imagining some kind of Svelte-like thing that creates the whole page worker-side, then generates minimal window-side JS to hydrate the components that’ll actually change. Of course I’d make it myself, but... oh, look over there...

(IMO they should still be called local servers, or server workers perhaps. Service worker is too vague)

nymanjon• 6 years ago

I'm working on something like this. Not really a framework though. More of a hodgepodge of JS that I've written and the front end logic would be something like HTMX/Behavior.js style of coding. It will be a progressively enhanced approach to writing a SPA so you could have no JS and it would still work! Or, if you have a modern browser it would work offline. We'll see if I ever finish it :-)

I'm doing a bit of a rewrite right now so this flexibility will come soon.

https://github.com/jon49/MealPlanner

Right now it only works offline.

edouard-harris• 6 years ago

Is this the same model meteor.js uses? I seem to recall their system maintains a mini-database on the client side and syncs it with the main server through a pub-sub model.

rglover• 6 years ago

Not quite. It's just a client-side cache of query results matching a MongoDB query on the server (pub/sub).

martinmunk• 6 years ago

Yes. At least it can use service workers. Meteor uses MongoDB on the backend, and minimongo client side. Those two are synced over their DDP protocol IIRC.

I miss meteor. It was such a great framework and promise. Not for big sites really, but for mock-ups, internal sites ect. A while ago I started to look at it again. The drivers behind the project was essentially asking for input on what was preventing people from using the framework. The current state of the project is/was OK, except for the fact that it was hold down by all the guides and howtos referring to previous versions. It was not well documented what current best practices to follow, what to use as replacements for deprecated dependencies ect.

jacobr• 6 years ago

Is ESI in Service Workers anything you’ve tried? A bit mind blown, never thought of that. Been putting of SW due to all horror stories of people bricking their sites basically

skoskie3• 6 years ago

Any good tutorials you’d recommend?

Aeolun2• 6 years ago

I have literally never had a worse experience developing than with serviceworkers.

Accidentally cache your index.js file? You are now stuck with your serviceworker forever (unless you do some chrome voodoo).

The promise is there, but it’s just a gigantic footgun.

winrid4• 6 years ago

If you build your SPA to an index.js file and serve it without a timestamp you're screwed when it gets cached too.

robertoandred• 6 years ago

That sounds incredibly complicated just to avoid using react

firefoxd• 6 years ago

Maybe this is more suited to stackoverflow but, how do you load with turbolinks when the two pages use different assets? Let's say each page have different js script tags.

kej• 6 years ago

Turbolinks gives you a few options, depending on if you want the script evaluated once or each time that page is loaded:

https://github.com/turbolinks/turbolinks#working-with-script...

cateye• 6 years ago

I've always felt this problem from the first time I touched Angular. It was just so much more complex and fragile without actually a lot of benefit unless you wanted to make a really interactive async application like Google Docs or Facebook Chat.

When SPA's became the norm and even static web pages needed to be build with React, developing became more and more inefficient. I saw whole teams struggling to build simple applications and wasting months of time, while these used to be developed within a couple of weeks with just 1 or 2 developers, on proven server side opinioated frameworks. But that was no longer according to best practices and industry standards. Everything needed to be SPA, micro services, distributed databases, Kubernetes etc. These components and layers needed to be glued together by trial and error.

I am really happy that common sense is starting to return and more developers are starting to realize that integrated end to end frameworks are very useful for a lot of real life application development scenario's.

throw_m2393394• 6 years ago

I've always felt this problem from the first time I touched Angular. It was just so much more complex and fragile without actually a lot of benefit unless you wanted to make a really interactive async application like Google Docs or Facebook Chat.

It sounds crazy to say that now but Angular became big because it was actually quite lightweight compared to other JS frameworks of this era, declarative 2 way databinding was cool, it was compatible with jQuery (thus its widget ecosystem) and it was also developed with testing in mind. So it was easy to move jQuery projects to Angular ones, and developers cared about this aspect and it helped organize code quite a bit. Angular 2 on the other hand never made sense and it was a solution looking for problem.

React and JSX came along and allowed developers to use JS classes when a lot of browsers didn't support them. And unidirectional dataflow was all at rage. It was always the right solution of course, but I never heard about DOM diffing before that which to me is the main appeal to React. To this date, HTML API still do not have a native(thus efficient) DOM diffing API which is a shame.

When SPA's became the norm and even static web pages needed to be build with React, developing became more and more inefficient. I saw whole teams struggling to build simple applications and wasting months of time, while these used to be developed within a couple of weeks with just 1 or 2 developers, on proven server side opinionated frameworks. But that was no longer according to best practices and industry standards. Everything needed to be SPA, micro services, distributed databases, Kubernetes etc. These components and layers needed to be glued together by trial and error.

IMHO the problem isn't React and co or even SPA. In fact writing an REST/Web API should be easier than writing a server-side generated HTML website (no need for templating language, ugly form frameworks,...). The problem is the horrible and complex NodeJS/NPM backed asset compilation pipelines and build tools that these framework often require in a professional setting, which incur a lot of complexity for very little gain.

Scarbutt3• 6 years ago

In fact writing an REST/Web API should be easier than writing a server-side generated HTML website (no need for templating language, ugly form frameworks,...).

Why is that easier? It's more work, you are now rendering two views instead of one, a JSON one(server) and HTML one(in the client) with all the JSON encoding/decoding that it entails. You are still using a templating language and, dealing with forms in React is more cumbersome than doing it server-side.

kccqzy• 6 years ago

React and JSX came along and allowed developers to use JS classes

Nitpick, but I doubt that was the reason developers are flocking to React back then. In the beginning browsers didn't support JavaScript classes and neither did React. You fake them by using a function known as React.createClass instead. There was also no transpilation required, as JSX was optional. In fact React was always about unidirectional data flow, and reasoning about state -> DOM elements rather than reasoning about changes to the DOM.

mixmastamyk• 6 years ago

The problem is the horrible and complex NodeJS/NPM backed asset compilation pipelines and build tools

Would like to hear more.

Nextgrid8• 6 years ago

Everything needed to be SPA, micro services, distributed databases, Kubernetes etc. These components and layers needed to be glued together by trial and error.

This is a major problem with our industry. Unfortunately, the people with the power to curb this trend have their paycheck depend on it continuing.

As a company, you are incentivised to have a large tech team to appear credible and raise funding, so you hire a CTO and maybe some engineering managers. Their career in turn benefits from managing large amounts of people and solving complex technical problems (even if self-inflicted), so they’ll hire 10x the amount of engineers the task at hands truly requires, organise them in separate teams and build an engineering playground that guarantees their employment and gives them talking points (for conferences or the seemingly-mandatory engineering blog or in interviews for their next role) about how they solve complex problems (self-inflicted, as a side-effect of an extremely complex stack with lots of moving parts). Developers themselves need to constantly keep up to date, so they won’t usually push back on having to use the latest frontend framework, and even if they do, that decision is out of their hands and they’ll just get replaced or not hired to begin with.

In the end, AWS and the cloud providers are laughing all the way to the bank to collect their (already generous) profits, now even more inflated by having their clients use 10x the amount of compute power that the business problem would normally require.

Maybe the issue is the seemingly-infinite amounts of money being invested into tech companies of dubious value, and the solution would be to get back to Earth as to have some financial pressure coming from up top that incentivises using the simplest solution to the problem at hand?

cutler9• 6 years ago

This is the main reason I refuse to entertain going perm in the tech sector. The amount of superfluous infrastructure and unquestioned use of SPA's is just an overwhelming time sink. I would honestly rather work with some 2-bit company's legacy PHP than this mountain of crap.

MattGaiser• 6 years ago

The problem that nobody knows whether something will become the next Google Docs. Transitioning to an SPA from something like jQuery is basically a complete rewrite.

To be willing to not use an SPA, you need to be willing to exclude certain options from day 1. Find me a product manager willing to do that.

Nextgrid8• 6 years ago

nobody knows whether something will become the next Google Docs

How many times has it actually happened that some scrappy startup has 1) became the next big thing and 2) not being at the edge of over-engineering actually killed it or significantly impacted its revenue? This just feels like wishful thinking.

Also keep in mind that even if you were on track to become the next Google Docs, this means your current product is usually good enough as-is and gives you time (and $$$) to improve it.

fendy30022• 6 years ago

Another view of this problem, evolving a SPA of CRUD app into Google Docs may also be a complete rewrite.

IMO when the time comes and your product is used well, you may be ready financially and technically to do a complete rewrite. Otherwise maybe the current functioning application is better if the rewrite isn't justified.

cutler9• 6 years ago

Kubernetes is the biggest joke. I remember working with a sysadmin who worked for The Guardian provisioning servers remotely as demand spiked. This is pre-AWS. He used Puppet and remarked that you would only ever need what he was using for managing massive fleets of servers. Then Kubernetes and Docker arrived, which were intended for even bigger deployments in data centres. Before you knew it, just as with SPA's, Kubernetes and Docker became the new requirements for web devs working on simple apps.

Nextgrid8• 6 years ago

Also never underestimate the power of a single bare-metal server. Today everyone seems to be in the clouds (pun intended) and has seemingly accepted the performance of terrible, underprovisioned VMs as the new normal.

te_chris2• 6 years ago

Kubernetes has been great for us and is much easier to manage over time than servers. There’s an adoption cliff, but I’d take kube over spinning your servers with puppet any day.

Hell I might even run kube if I was running bare metal. Declarative workloads are amazing.

black3r2• 6 years ago

Kubernetes is overkill for most applications that's true, but Docker is awesome because it solves almost all of the "it works on my machine, doesn't work in prod" and "it worked yesterday, doesn't work today" issues and isn't that hard to adopt.

switz• 6 years ago

developing became more and more inefficient

Anecdotally I find the opposite to be true. I've been writing frontend code for over a decade, but I've never moved faster and wrote less buggy code than now. Is that because I've become a better developer? Sure, a little bit. But by and large, I don't believe that ultimately is the reason. I think it's the maturity in the technology. My growth as a programmer is hardly linear and the past 5 years have not matched the growth I achieved in my first 5. Frontend tooling has never been better than it is today.

What I believe, is that the bar to build web applications has been lowered, and there are more programmers than today than ever before. You have people who are not experts in frontend development and javascript trying to build complex UIs and applications. So you take this person who doesn't have the requisite experience and put them to work on a paradigm with a lot of depth (frontend) using frameworks that are really simple and easy to get started with, but compound problems as they are misused.

Another factor is that since SPAs are stateful, complexity mounts aggressively. Instead of a refresh on a stateless page every few seconds, one page causes bugs that rear their head for the duration of the session. These inexperienced people are put in charge of designing codebases that don't scale and become spaghetti. But when designed properly, these problems are largely negated.

I'm not advocating that SPAs are the solution to all problems. I think there's gross overuse of SPAs across the industry, but that is not an indictment of SPAs themselves. That is someone choosing the wrong technology to solve the active problem.

With respect to angular (1, I never touched 2) specifically, I always found it extremely overengineered, poorly designed, with terrible APIs. But that's a problem with that specific framework and says nothing at all about SPAs at all.

Nextgrid8• 6 years ago

Frontend tooling has never been better than it is today.

What's the library or design pattern to consume a REST API in React or any of the mainstream front-end frameworks? The only thing I'm aware of is Ember Data but Ember is apparently not cool anymore, and I couldn't find a suitable replacement.

I'm asking because in all the projects I've been involved with, consuming the backend API always felt like a mess with lots of reinventing the wheel (poorly) and duplication of code. I can't believe in 2020 there's not some kind of library I can call that will give me my backend resources as JSON and transparently handle all the caching, pagination, error handling (translate error responses to exceptions), etc and people have to do all this by hand when calling something like Axios.

In contrast, Django REST Framework handles all that boilerplate for me and allows me to jump right into writing the business logic. It's insane that ~30 lines of code with DRF (https://www.django-rest-framework.org/#example) gives me a way to expose RESTful endpoints for a database model to the web with authentication, pagination, validation, filtering, etc in a reusable way (these are just Python classes after all) but the modern front-end doesn't have the client equivalent of this.

save_ferris• 6 years ago

These inexperienced people are put in charge of designing codebases that don't scale and become spaghetti.

I think this is one area where front end tooling can be painful for the average dev. The bar to writing idiomatic JS for a given framework can get pretty high quickly, especially when you look at some of the really popular tools out there (i.e. redux).

Front end work has become so much harder to grok because the patterns around things like state management still have a lot of warts. The terminology of redux drives me crazy because it’s really difficult to explain things like reducers.

rawoke0836002• 6 years ago

I definitely agree you, F.E Tools has gotten a lot more mature and we have a lot further to go as well.

I'm primarily a backend developer and I think in general backend developers makes for "poor fronted devs". I'm talking about those "occasional" times the backend-dev needs to do some f.e dev work. Just because they don't know the tech as well, best practises and spend as much time with it as a dedicated F.E Dev. jQuery code written by the "occasional front-end dev" is kinda horrific in many cases.

Now please internet hear me. I'm not saying you can't write bad code in a JS-Framework. I'm saying it's usually less often and less bad - especially for non-dedicated f.e devs

Like crossing a street, just looking left and right won't guarantee you to be safe in your crossing, but it damn near makes it less probable.

If you are a shop with mostly backend-devs and don't want to invest in a F.E dev, you definitely should look into a js-framework.

*Svelte is always good start very small and bare bones.

bryanrasmussen• 6 years ago

What I believe, is that the bar to build web applications has been lowered,

Yes, the bar to build web applications has been lowered. We can all build something on the level of GMail now.

The ability to build websites has been crippled, because you are often forced to build the sites using the tools suited to applications. As you and both the parent comment seem to agree on.

avereveard• 6 years ago

Frontend tooling has never been better than it is today.

eh. Swing in its golden age run circle around what we have now. Granted it's old tech now that we settled for in-browser delivery, but still:

- look and feels could do theming you can only dream of with css variables/scss

- serialize and restore gui states partially or whole, including listeners

- value binding systems vue can only dream of

- native scrollers everywhere you could style and listen to without the rendered complaining about passive handlers. - layout that didn't threw a fit about forced reflows

- unhappy with the standard layouts? build your own one as needed

- debug everything, including the actual render call that put an image where it is

- works the same in all supported os

browsers are an insufferable environment to work within compared to that, css is powerful and all but you get a system you can only work by inference, and were everything interferes with everything else by default, which works great to style a document and is a tragedy in an app with many reusable nested components.

kochthesecond• 6 years ago

Yeah, there is some overuse of SPAs I agree, but havent anyone in this thread worked in older java monoliths with JSP or even good old Struts framework?? THEN you can see what inefficient development looks like.

ehnto• 6 years ago

Everyone looks to the bigger companies for tech trends, not realising that they have none of the problems ultra scale companies are trying to solve.

laichzeit0• 6 years ago

I also wonder how much of the SPA trend by mega corps was about shifting compute “client side” to save money on infrastructure. It’s kinda like modern data warehouses where storage/compute is now so cheap you do ELT and not ETL anymore. I probably wouldn’t do an SPA today unless I really had to.

cs02rm0• 6 years ago

When SPA's became the norm and even static web pages needed to be build with React

I'm in a weird situation where I'm contracting into one organisation and they've contracted me out to another. The first organisation know me as a senior dev/architect with 15 years experience in a niche domain. The second organisation see me as brand new to them and despite paying an embarrassing day rate are giving me noddy UI tweaks to do. Extracting myself is proving to be slow somehow.

Anyway, they wanted a webapp with a couple of APIs and nothing on the page than a button, the authenticated username and a line of text. Clicking the button opts you in/out of a service and the text changes depending on the state. The sort of thing people go to once, maybe twice.

I used a mustache template on the server side to populate the values and I didn't even bother with any javascript, just did an old school form submission to the API when the button was clicked and a redirect back to the page.

It was tiny but, obviously it was decided "we should be using a more modern framework" - code for React. It was the more word that got to me, as if there was an equivalent, dated framework I'd used. I didn't put up a fight partly because I was new to the team and figured they were hot on React and I wasn't. Somehow, they made a complete hash of it, they couldn't even figure out how to get all their inline styles (the only styles they used) working without help.

I guess it's just those classics; people want to learn the hot new thing as they see it, their managers are happy that they've heard a buzzword they recognise and then everything becomes a nail for their new hammer.

onion2k• 6 years ago

Every time that sort of thing has happened to me it's been because there's some grand plan to build out more features that the people on the frontline don't know about. The plan rarely materializes but the idea that the foundation should be built in a way that supports it isn't completely stupid.

skytreader4• 6 years ago

It's interesting to contrast this kind of organizational behavior with the type where "management won't give us time to deal with technical debt". Though arguably using an over-complicated framework is creating more technical debt, on a certain perspective, this is on the other end of this scale.

It seems to me what we want is some kind of "Platonic ideal" where the extremes are bad for development:

  Management won't give us time to deal with technical debt/incorporate best practices.
  |
  |
  THE IDEAL
  |
  |
  Management wants the Hot New Thing all the time. uservices are the state-of-the-art in best practices so uservices it is!

The best advice (IMO) in dealing with the top end of this spectrum is to frame technical debt and best practices in terms of whatever economic metric the manager cares about (e.g., "TDD will lead to less bugs, ergo happier customers, ergo greater retention"). But I wonder if the same framing can be used to encourage temperance in managers who dwell on the bottom of my spectrum.

I somehow suspect it won't work. The problem with those at the top is that they see the dev's proposition as an investment that will either not bear fruit or, worse, slow the team down; so they are incentivized to keep status quo. Those at the bottom, however, start from a perspective that their idea will add value to the team so they keep pushing for it no matter what. And telling them "Let's not do what Google does; we're not Google" is definitely seen as a devaluation of the team.

This has been a weird headspace to explore. I'd love to hear from others' experience on dealing with this.

Cthulhu_• 6 years ago

Honestly when they come with decisions like that, I'd like them to spend some time on a formal writeup - have them prove they understand the problem, the existing solution, the issues with it, and why React or technology X would solve it. Have them explain why they / their employer should spend thousands on changing it.

I mean it'll only take them an hour or two to write it up, better to spend that than the 20 hours it would take you (for example) to spin up a new stack.

ec1096852• 6 years ago

Biggest problem with templating libraries like mustache is they aren’t context aware, so it is up to the programmer to remember the proper way to escape based on where a variable is used.

throwaway1892623• 6 years ago

React isn't so bad. It's fairly straightforward and the components are contained within the page. And it's more of a library than a framework. The core is small and easy to learn

Angular is a giant confusing pile of magic. It's so complex you've gotta be a core developer to even understand how an app comes together. Stay the hell away if you can

marcus_holmes• 6 years ago

I don't think it's developers tbh. Or rather, it's another set of perverse incentives in the industry.

To get a job, devs need experience in relevant tech. No company is willing to train their devs - they all have to hit the ground running. So devs have to have demonstrable experience in the tech that lots of companies use. Companies need to hire devs, and don't really care what tech is used. But using what everyone else uses makes their hiring easier because it's easier to find devs who want to work on that tech. So they advertise for devs with experience in a hot tech. The devs see this and try and move their internal projects to use the hot tech so that if/when they look for their next job they'll have experirence in it.

The devs are just trying to stay relevant in a rapidly changing tech scene so they can get their next job.

The companies who employ them don't care what tech is used, but find recruiting devs to be easier if they're working in the latest hot tech.

The key point that could change all this is if companies were willing to train their devs in the tech stack they're using.

vanburen• 6 years ago

The hydrogen client for matrix.org (1) has an interesting approach using vanilla JavaScript and indexeddb.

From a previous this week in matrix(2): "Hydrogen tries to be the lightest Element. It is written entirely in vanilla javascript (no React, no Webpack) for complete control, structured as an MVVM app, leveraging the raw performance of indexeddb."

(1) https://github.com/vector-im/hydrogen-web (2)https://matrix.org/blog/2020/08/14/this-week-in-matrix-2020-...

jolux7• 6 years ago

One entry in this space that doesn't get a lot of attention is ASP.NET Blazor [1]. Blazor gives you the option of writing views in C# that will actually compile to WebAssembly and run in the browser, or run on the server and send DOM updates over a SignalR connection, a lot like LiveView.

[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/blazor/

catmanjan2• 6 years ago

Last time I looked it couldn't run in the browser, and there was no ETA, has that changed?

mpmpmpmp2• 6 years ago

Yes it runs in the browser. I have several clients with Blazor webassembly apps running in production right now.

unsignedint• 6 years ago

And best of all, both Server and WebAssembly has a lot in common, so it is possible to make that movment as needed. (I often prototype in server, as it's a lot easier to debug, too!)

kumarvvr7• 6 years ago

If you are using Blazor Server, you don't have to even think about REST APIs. Depending on your app, that might be good or bad. But if you primarily target browsers on Desktop, you can tremendously improve productivity, because you can directly use C# POCO Models for UI and backend data services.

ablekh5• 6 years ago

Blazor is certainly a very interesting and promising piece of technology. However, Blazor Server hosting mode is prone to latency issues and requires always-on connection to run an applications (so, no offline mode). On the other hand, the alternative Blazor WebAssembly mode requires clients to download a sizeable mix of .NET runtime and other system DLLs on the first use of the application (even a lightweight demo application with almost zero app-specific resources requires a download of 6+ MB of data in DEBUG mode and 2+ MB in RELEASE mode). Of course, relevant Microsoft teams work hard on further minimizing the size of the system bundle, but there are obvious limits to efforts in this regard.

wyattpeak• 6 years ago

Is offline mode widely used? I remember it being released to great excitement and then I never heard about it again. I assumed it died out when being offline became too much of an edge-case for your average user to be worth dealing with.

jolux7• 6 years ago

Are the latency issues specific to Blazor Server or are they inherent in any framework that uses this pattern, like LiveView?

kumarvvr7• 6 years ago

2 MB should not be an issue nowadays. Considering 5G roll out & substantial coverage in most mature markets, in say, 2 - 3 years, 2 MB is acceptable.

mattferderer• 6 years ago

I believe the runtime is under 1 MB before compression. As you stated, they're working hard to reduce that size.

At the same time, while not condoning it, I just scrolled to the bottom of Amazon's front page and downloaded over 30 MB.

Scarbutt3• 6 years ago

ASP.NET core is still all the same over-engineered enterprise baggage you see in the Java world.

tester756• 6 years ago

What makes you think so? I'm actually curious

jolux7• 6 years ago

Admittedly I don't have a lot of experience with enterprise web development in Java but I love working with ASP.NET Core and I think it's come a long way since the mess of Web Forms and classic ASP.

pcjthug• 6 years ago

it smokes Spring in benchmarks, often by a factor of 10x or more, and on plaintext it's 50x faster than spring and even with the fastest Rust/C++ frameworks, so must be some awfully light baggage

GordonS3• 6 years ago

It's not. You can literally have a simple "hello world" app in a handful of lines or code if you want.

I have to wonder if you actually use ASP.NET Core yourself, because ASP.NET Core 3 is, IMO, fantastic. ASP.NET used to be a bit clunky, and lacking in extensibility points, and a lot of people used alternatives like Nancy instead. Nancy officially stopped development around a year back, largely because dotnet devs just don't need it anymore. I was a long-time Nancy fan myself, ASP.NET Core 3 has all the best bits and more.

And you don't need to stick with the typical paradigm on controllers in one folder, views in another etc - feature folders work great. Hell, you don't even really need to use controllers, if Razor Pages are your thing.

cutler9• 6 years ago

Blazor currently has to ship its runtime over the wire so it's not an option for anything bandwidth constrained.

jolux7• 6 years ago

Not if you use Blazor Server.

kumarvvr7• 6 years ago

Yup. Been using it for a very complex data app. Its awesome.

You can choose Wasm for LOB apps or on fast connections.

You can choose Server hosting for apps that have about 100,000 users at a time. Mind you, that is 100,000 users concurrently. Which should be more than enough for most apps.

There are plans to reduce bundle size and server side resources, coming in .NET 5.

As per Microsoft Benchmarks[1], it should cost about 100 USD per month (3 years, reserved instances, paid upfront) to handle 20,000 concurrent users. (This price is not including database, storage, etc). That comes to about 0.18 USD per user, for 3 years. (cost of serving app to 1 user for 3 years in total). Which seems pretty reasonable, especially if you have a decent, paid app. The cost comes down even more, if only a %age of your users are online concurrently.

On Digital Ocean, a similar machine, would cost about 40 USD a month. For 3 years, total cost for 1 users will be 0.072 USD

[1] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/aspnet/blazor-server-in-net-c...

ForHackernews2• 6 years ago

I guess it's still targeting the client-side SPA case, but I think Svelte[0] is worth a shoutout for taking a different approach than React/Vue/Angular/etc. The Svelte "framework" is really just a compiler that produces a small bundle of vanilla JS that updates the DOM directly (no virtual DOM).

[0] https://svelte.dev/

swanson• 6 years ago

I've had great success with the Turbolinks + Stimulus approach. There are a couple of common patterns that you'll reach for, namely, lazy loading content (basically a <div> with a URL attribute that you have Stimulus load via AJAX) and really leaning into Rails remote-link / server javascript responses for modals and little page updates.

It's so great to still be super productive and be able to crank out several pages of an app in a few hours vs most of the React / SPA codebases where you might send the whole day on one little component.

aledalgrande• 6 years ago

curious how you would implement refresh of a single row in a table after a job has completed? have enjoyed this combination too, but I feel like you'd have to subscribe to multiple ActionCable channels to do this?

brainbag6• 6 years ago

StimulusReflex can do something like this quite easily. It re-renders the entire page (suggesting that you do a lot of fragment caching so this is fast) and then diffs it on client side with morphdom (IRC). I believe you can do partial rendering now, but I haven't tried it.

tpetry• 6 years ago

I am using the combination too. You really get a very near SPA feeling with a lot less effort.

BUT basecamp libraries (turbolinks, stimulus) are horrible open source libraries. There are not any changes or bug fixes for months now (for both) and nobody does know whats the actual state, whether they are abandoned or basecamp is working on something new. Then hey.com released and people found new features in both frameworks, so one day they will release (again) completely reworked versions of these libraries they have been working on in their private repositories.

Both libraries are really good together, but they would be better if developed more open by the community. They are basically abandonware the day they are released, until one day a complete rewrite and major version bump is released.

JeremyNT• 6 years ago

This is my go-to as well, and it really has worked out quite well for me. Everything feels super responsive and I find it very easy to create reusable stimulus controllers.

I come from the "js sprinkles" approach that rails has always favored, and this feels like a logical next iteration. I sometimes wonder why Basecamp doesn't publicize Stimulus a bit more; I really only learned about it at rails conf. It feels almost like it could be a part of rails itself, and it's the kind of thing that is useful for almost any full stack rails app that does server side rendering.

camgunz2• 6 years ago

I've been building a site with Svelte/Apollo/Hasura. It's been pretty amazing so far. I think if you can get away with not needing SEO it's hard to beat.

That said, something that requires a lot of thought is not just constantly displaying spinners. When I look at projects built by experienced FEs it seems like there's a lot of patterns to work around this that I'm not aware of.

ZephyrBlu• 6 years ago

That said, something that requires a lot of thought is not just constantly displaying spinners. When I look at projects built by experienced FEs it seems like there's a lot of patterns to work around this that I'm not aware of

I'm not sure what patterns you're thinking of. To me this just sounds like implementing caching and background fetching.

camgunz2• 6 years ago

Yeah, it's mostly that--generally also some design stuff to hide it. It's just so tedious, or you can buy into a big framework with all the downsides that implies (big bundle size or a lot of tooling for code splitting).

brylie2• 6 years ago

HTMX https://htmx.org/

LiteDOM https://litedom.js.org/

Stimulus https://stimulusjs.org/

Turbolinks https://github.com/turbolinks/turbolinks

rolae2• 6 years ago

Stimulus Reflex https://docs.stimulusreflex.com/

Laravel Livewire https://laravel-livewire.com/

Phoenix LiveView https://github.com/phoenixframework/phoenix_live_view

That's where I see a lot of potential. With Stimulus Reflex I have the convenience and development speed of Rails and I can enhance it with StimulusJS sprinkles and reflexes to create great experiences for the user. The interactivity I get is enough for 90%+ of the webapps out there and the complexity to do it is far less.

tapvt• 6 years ago

I am quite a fan of HTMX and am using it for multiple projects now. I hope it continues to gain traction.

edwinyzh• 6 years ago

Me too! As a developer mostly with desktop software development experiences, htmx is so much straightforward to understand and easy to code, it's a perfect chose for me to implement pages such as 'License Upgrade', 'License Renew', and so on: https://docxmanager.com/miscpages/upgrade-to-standard-from-b...

brainbag6• 6 years ago

Do you have any examples or favorite articles about using it? I'm exploring the space, but have really limited time to sit down with all of the different options today. HTMX is one that is very intriguing.

dinkleberg2• 6 years ago

How do you handle things like menu pop-ups and toggling/hiding content? I keep wanting to use htmx and it's like, but there always seem to be very common tasks like having an expandable menu on mobile that don't have a great solution in these libraries and I have to write vanilla JS.

I've settled on Alpine instead for the time being because it has some data management built in. I'm thinking I'm going to have to switch to Vue on my current project because I feel so much less productive with Alpine.

lexx2• 6 years ago

I think there is another layer to that conversation. Frameworks become bureaucratic and boring because they are developed by large teams for large teams. Most developers are working on small projects and need more fun and less maintaining huge amount of boilerplate code that recreates the browser.

The framework that I feel makes development less ugly is svelte. But still, I really don't like the idea of heavy client side websites. It really makes everything more complicated and the user's device slower.

I love the simplicity of Turbolinks, I love how clean svelte code is and I am trying to figure out the "glue"

banashark• 6 years ago

I went down this route recently. There are a couple of different options depending on your preference:

• Write the glue code yourself if you only need svelte on a few pages • Inertiajs if you want to replace your view layer with svelte

lexx2• 6 years ago

I agree with you. I did give a look at Inertiajs just because Laravel was friendly towards it. Looks sweet.

Right now the "glue" I came up with is a silly connection between the server side router and the "Entry" component of Svelte. It works, it's 10 lines of code, it's clean and the website is super fast. But, both Inertia and my solution feel somehow "hackish". Not a proper pattern.

But really, anything to avoid client side routing, state management and auto-magic code splitting.

brainbag6• 6 years ago

Wow, InertiaJS looks like exactly what I've been wishing for. Component-driven SFCs in Vue are the best tool I've used for interfaces in 20+ years, but I don't love having an API layer between the client and server. This is really interesting. Do you have experience with it and know how it handles frequently live-updating pages?

Existenceblinks2• 6 years ago

The only weak point for Svelte is there is no inline template composition (yet; already has a rfc). Anything that doesn't look like function is weak compossibility. Imagine recursively calling template itself with a bunch of condition logics, each branch renders different nested templates, and each of those calling its own ancestor root. Svelte is a joke to this thing.

ChicagoDave3• 6 years ago

Micro front-ends and packaged business capabilities. Build encapsulated domains (views, events, apis, data store) with their own dependencies (not shared with umbrella app) and pluggable with meta data.

throw_m2393394• 6 years ago

I genuinely understood nothing to that comment. Are you talking about frames? Please develop.

EpicEng• 6 years ago

You're not the only one. Sounds a lot like a former CTO of mine who couldn't write a line of code to save his life, but made sure to randomly toss out buzzwords and make sure you were aware of what he recently read in what I assume was an edition of Programming for Dummies.

Multicomp2• 6 years ago

My company talked about using micro front ends for a while. basically there was one microservice that actually served the web page itself and all of the controls and widgets on the web page were pulled from other microservices via API calls that each handled their own internal state.

ChicagoDave3• 6 years ago

I'm definitely not a mindless CTO. ;)

Micro front-ends is the concept of breaking apart a front-end monolith. SPA's are usually built in one framework like Angular or React. Over time, this can get very convoluted and turn into a bad monolith (there are good ones).

The second part is that instead of building screens, you design features (like invoices or customers or catalog) and develop the set of views that encapsulate the targeted domain. This is all built in a separate project with a well-defined set of meta data. You deploy the feature-set into your integrated environment and the managing app is constantly on the lookout for new features-sets.

Then in some admin portion of your umbrella app, you provide access to API's to other feature-sets, and to users.

One of the key elements is to keep front-end dependencies separate. So the manager app might be Angular 9, the customer feature-set might be in Angular 10 with its own dependencies. Nothing is shared between the manager app and each feature-set and nothing is shared between feature-sets.

This provides a front-end that is malleable and reduces dependency creep.

This can also benefit from Domain-Driven Design, where you've segregated your domains and their API's, Events, and Data Storage.

So you should be able to "publish" a feature-set without any dependency on a central database, API mesh, or Event manager.

The key is to define your boundaries well and that is no small thing.

recursivedoubts3• 6 years ago

Well, we could go back to the original model for the web, using REST & HATEOAS without arguing or even really thinking about it, by building hypertext-based applications.

Of course, the hypertext we have, HTML, wasn't completed, and it leaves a lot to be desired. I have tried to fix that with htmx:

https://htmx.org

542458• 6 years ago

Hey, this is super cool. Thanks for building it!

One quick question: How should I be handling server side errors with this? Like, normally I’d check the status code coming from the server and throw up an error modal if it’s an error - what’s the equivalent mechanism here?

Deimorz• 6 years ago

I haven't looked into htmx much yet, but am using its predecessor intercooler-js, and this is my code for handling server responses and displaying an error message when it's needed: https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/-/blob/master/tildes/static...

I wouldn't consider it particularly elegant, but it's straightforward and has worked well. It uses the "complete.ic" event to trigger whenever an intercooler request finishes, and then uses the response status/code/text to display an appropriate message.

recursivedoubts3• 6 years ago

htmx triggers a bunch of different events based on various request life cycle events.

For server errors you'd use htmx:responseError:

https://htmx.org/events/#htmx:responseError

You could write some code like so:

   htmx.on("htmx:responseError", function(evt) {
     GrowlNotification.notify({
       title: 'Request Error',
       description: evt.detail.xhr.responseText
     })
   })

And that would show a growl notification in the event of an request error. Or however you wanted to display it.

tonetheman• 6 years ago

I think if Chrome changes to the omnibox really click. The need for SPA in general will dwindle. You cannot see the URL so if it is ugly who cares. And if the page refreshes fast enough most end users will not be able to tell you are on a SPA or not.

buzzerbetrayed3• 6 years ago

What is displayed in the URL has nothing to do with SPAs. Go to Twitter. It is an SPA. The URL changes on every click, just like basically all modern SPAs.

dragonwriter2• 6 years ago

SPA has nothing to do with URL. If your SPA uses a routing/history solution so deeplinks and history and the back button work properly (and it should), it's exactly, in terms of URLs, like what you'd naively expect from a non-SPA app.

baybal22• 6 years ago

You can achieve near SPA performance with XSLT in the frontend, and stitching multiple XMLs using it.

- No JS fallback by default

- Naturally friendly to XML database backends

- Huge cache hit improvements

- Effectively, you get the functionality of the now abandoned "seamless" iframe attribute

untog2• 6 years ago

Yeah but then you have to use XSLT.

(Jokes aside, I tried this years ago hoping for it to be a magic bullet. Gzipping meant that the bandwidth savings weren’t anywhere near what I hoped and XSLT is a PITA to deal with)

baybal22• 6 years ago

Tons of 10+ years old bugs in Chrome, yes, full of hacks, but it's doable.

mst3• 6 years ago

I'm not sure if it's still a going concern but I found SXSLT made XSLT much less annoying to deal with. It's a natural fit for S-exprs.

mpmpmpmp2• 6 years ago

A certain fortune 500 finance company did their entire website this way using java 6 EE and serving up the data layer with XML -> Hibernate -> DB2 mainframe queries about 10 years ago. Probably still vestiges of that now.

bgdkbtv8• 6 years ago

I'm building an app with a TALL stack now (Tailwind, Alpine.js, Laravel, and Livewire) and I am incredibly productive. Very little build step required (to compile Tailwind to reduce the size based on which classes are used in .blade.php files). CRUD, Image uploads etc are so easily done I am such a fan. I was skeptical at first, but now I love this way of building web apps. No idea how well it scales, but for a simple MVP I couldn't have asked for a better stack.

yagodragon2• 6 years ago

Seriously, after all these years of JavaScript,SPA,react,redux craze, we're back at PHP, css and minimal js all over again. None of those new js frameworks allow you to build custom web apps faster than Laravel or Rails. I'm really curious about what kind of side projects all these people are building with e.g. next.js alone. Is there any kind of web app that doesn't need authentication, authorization and database access?

bgdkbtv8• 6 years ago

I write full SPAs at work, professionally. We use React, Apollo, GraphQL, Webpack etc. the TALL stack is such a breath of fresh air. I can't even begin to explain my joy. Just joy.

I now dread the time I have to write those infinite lines of JS, conflicting dependencies, slow build times, React hook state management etc.

When I speak with my colleagues about tech, they all seem to love the entangled mess of JS dev and willing to jump on any new framework that gets released. I always push for good old reliable SSR. Often get called the weird one for being young, yet favoring old school tech, though.

I guess I prefer a better developer experience and shorter time to production/market, rather than spending days trying to setup a project and figure out weird quirks and issues with such a complicated mess of a "serverless, modern day web application".

bgdkbtv8• 6 years ago

Regarding auth and db, the ones I've spoken with that prefer JS way of doing things like to combine a bunch of existing offerings into one, eg Auth0 for Auth, Prisma for DB and so on. The more potential points of failure, the more attractive it seems to them.

When saying that Laravel/RoR gives you all that by running one simple command, I get blank stares. Hard to believe, I know.

cutler9• 6 years ago

For all the speed bumps PHP 7 delivered Laravel typically scores lower than Django and Rails on Techempower benchmarks. This and the reality that PHP roles typically pay 20% less than Ruby, Python or Node has led me to ignore Laravel.

bgdkbtv8• 6 years ago

I haven't built anything that requires significant performance tweaking other than some caching and SQL optimisations. Maybe PHP 8 will bring an even better performance when it gets released

HP roles typically pay 20% less

Yeah, true. Hence why I am a React dev professionally

winrid4• 6 years ago

Techempower is neat, but there are plenty of companies making tens of millions with less than 100 rps...

rawoke0836002• 6 years ago

Just to chime in here. Laravel is definitely not "known" for their performance.

rochak• 6 years ago

I saw this SPA performance issue when interacting with Azure and GCP console. AWS console, on the other hand, is mostly non SPA and responds super fast. It didn’t feel jarring and loaded very quickly. It had a questionable UI, but I feel that AWS might have noticed that SPA would ruin the UX of navigating consoles. It is a small thing, but a big reason why I prefer developing with AWS. GCP comes close second in terms of performance with a SPA. Azure just shits the bed and seems like a pile of mess. What has your experience been like?

jlokier3• 6 years ago

The Phoenix LiveView pattern is one that I thought was the near-ideal interactive page architecture 20 years ago, long before Elixir and even before XHR was standardised. (We had other methods for AJAX and server-sent events to achieve it in those days.)

It surprises me that there are so few implementations using this pattern today.

The Meteor pattern is another good one for the user, if you like things better optimised for user-visible latency (as user interactions happen at the client first), but it hasn't ended up with much mindshare now. Perhaps because it's more complicated to use, and perhaps because JavaScript isn't ideal for this.

Svelte's precompiled diffs and minimal client-side code is another pattern I like.

For an application I worked on, I developed a combination of those three patterns. It had a nice and very efficient combination of server-side rendering and client-side immediate interaction, without needing custom JavaScript. This made it fast, user-friendly and pleasant to develop in.

Like LiveView, the client would send user events to the server, which would update affected component model state (which could be shared among different clients too). Server would re-render any visual components which used the model data (using automatic dependency tracking from previous renders), and then send an async event to each affected client containing an efficient diff of all rendered changes. If there was much network latency or too much queued, multiple updates would be batched together, merging their diffs efficiently. The result was the update could be worst-case the size of a page replacement for any number of updates, and at best the size of a few DOM edits in place.

But, a little bit like Meteor (but without custom JS), the server could also push "client event-handling hints" in the rendered model to the client. If an event pattern-matched one of these hints, the update could be applied immediately on the client as well as the event sent to the server. The server knew what update would have been applied, and could account for it in the diff. So if the server's new rendering matched the client's immediate rendering, the diff was empty and didn't need to be sent! But if the server got a different result, for example the event caused an operation which failed, the diff caused the client to receive an appropriate correction.

The diffs were calculated efficiently too, not by rendering components and comparing trees, but by precalculating diff trails from state change patterns where those could be recognised. For example when one model value changed, if the diff would always be just a string change in the DOM, it already knew and emitted that diff directly. This meant diff calculation time was as fast as possible in simple cases (event to output in O(1)), and reduced to a reasonable diff time in the most complex cases (such as merged diffs).

Keeping it always perfectly in sync and always efficient, throughout network outages, reordered requests, lost events etc was quite technical, but it wasn't application specific. Only the framework needed to deal with the technicality.

This was lovely, because it always stayed in sync, it was always efficient for any combination of initial loads, reloads, and sync events, both on slow and fast networks, it worked without JavaScript if needed, had client-side immediate updates for simple logic of a general-purpose nature specified by the server-side, could share model state among different clients and pages, and still didn't need any custom JavaScript for the application.

As the server side was written in async coroutines and Perl, it didn't seem worth the effort of packaging and publishing that implementation as Perl's popularity declined (and indeed coroutines seem disfavoured there as well, even though they work brilliantly).

I still think that's a lovely interactive webpage model, possibly the best. Nicer than client-side SPAs and nicer than server-side rendering. It's pleasant to develop for, pleasant as a user as well, very fast in many different scenarios including poor network connectivity, and great for sharing live state that appears in multiple pages or documents.

I'd like to implement that again in a modern language, but I haven't had any compelling reason to work on a webapp lately.

jononomo• 6 years ago

This was super-interesting for me to read. I developed in Meteor for about two years. I started out a major fan, but was quite disappointed in the framework by the end. I'm now excited about Elixir/Phoenix/LiveView/BEAM and am about to spend a few months getting myself up to speed with that whole ecosystem.

dsiegel22752• 6 years ago

Same boat, I got into Meteor for a while years ago (even built a side project that ran in production and made real money for a couple of years).

For the last year I have been writing Elixir/Phoenix full-time at work on a greenfield project. We have gone "all in" on LiveView and our using it in a significant portion of our system. I have been very impressed with it so far. When pairing LiveView with Phoenix PubSub, one can achieve Meteor-like 'reactivity' with remarkable ease.

mst3• 6 years ago

The basic issue was that the coroutine package was segfaulty and maintained by a man so lovely to interact with that the node.js core team eventually invented libuv (to replace his ev library) primarily so they never had to talk to him again.

Perl now has http://p3rl.org/Future::AsyncAwait which is (like any async/await system) a bit more restricted than a full coroutine but works beautifully.

If you threw a github repo up somewhere I can think of a few people who might be interested in trying to update it to more recent+reliable perl tech.

jlokier3• 6 years ago

Thanks for the suggestions!

But I've found Coro highly reliable and effective, including under stressed and complex loads, for about 6 years. Never found it segfaulty. It also performed well, and the API design always impressed me with its cleanliness and good documentation.

Also I make extensive use of coroutine-local variables (like `thread_local` in C11) which operate at the same speed as normal `my` lexicals. I.e. as fast as possible. It's just a good way that ordinary non-async modules can be trivially made async-safe, without performance loss, and without becoming tied to async or not-async (they become equally flexible for both uses, which is valuable). (The module to make them run that fast isn't public, but the API it relies on to work is part of Coro. `Future::AsyncAwait` doesn't provide the necessary API at the moment.)

Perl now has http://p3rl.org/Future::AsyncAwait which is (like any async/await system) a bit more restricted than a full coroutine but works beautifully

I'm not convinced. Future::AsyncAwait is a different paradigm, and doesn't do the things I find Coro useful for.

Async/await has the "function colour" problem - every module that might logically "block" has to be re-engineered with a new, async version of the same module. Same applies to any function which might call another to any depth in the call graph which then "blocks". People have argued that the "function colour" problem with async/await isn't really a problem. I'd argue that it's fine if you've designed around it from the start and you don't intend to use code in both async and non-async environments.

That re-engineering can be done, but it's a massive change to existing modules, and then you end up with something that can only be used in an async/await program.

Whereas Coro is non-invasive. I use the same modules in an async server or in a classic process-forking server (without loading Coro and no concerns about async issues), as well as standalone processes (scripts). I choose appropriately depending on the service characteristics (e.g. async is poorly suited to some kinds of loads such as computationally heavy request processing). Also for some things it's good to have the confidence that comes from not loading any fancy stuff, e.g. in security code and standalone scripts.

For that dual-use functionality, as far as I can tell with Future::AsyncAwait I'd need to write two separate versions of most things.

It turns out a lot of things might call something that, via a deep and opaque call chain, might block somewhere. E.g. any code that loads a config file when it's first run. Anything that uses a template, and calls out to a template compiler. Anything that compiles and loads code lazily. Anything that does something as trivial as stat() on a file.

In practice for my web stuff that means nearly everything (as you can imagine from my GP comment). I also make heavy use of JSX-ish templates instead of custom Perl code. It's just cleaner, and they can be targeted to other languages, even compiled to C for speed. Template components end up inheriting the same async properties as the server they are running in. A page may refrence subresources, microservice calls, data fetches or file reads. All fetched or calculated in parallel (calling other services or using multiple cores if necessary), which is good for latency.

There's also a software engineering impact. As soon as you get deep into complex logic like filesystems, and especially with memory allocation inside those, which triggers nested filesystem access, it's just too much work to engineer everything in an async state machine way. That's why the Linux kernel was unable to do correct asynchronous I/O through AIO functions for many years, and that's why everything end up choosing threads instead of AIO in userspace too: libuv that you mentioned is a great example!

update it to more recent+reliable perl tech

I think "reliable" is misleading. Coro is highly reliable (for me anyway), while Future::AsyncAwait has documented gotchas.

For "more recent", the Perl community has picked its path. In my view it's a less useful path, and I'm disappointed Perl core didn't choose to implement a coroutine mechanism. But it didn't.

With Coro all the modules just work without anything Coro-specific in them. (Just a few coro-local-data annotations, which are ignored when Coro isn't loaded.) It's neat!

As I use the same code in async and non-async contexts, I really don't see me using Future::AsyncAwait and writing two versions of each module.

If you threw a github repo up somewhere I can think of a few people who might be interested

I never did get that framework to a point where I'm happy to publish, because it's entangled with commercial and private code. Cleaning up the separation seemed like a goal once, but I think I'd be wasting my time now. It's a great shame when you have a big personal library of Really Useful Modules, but sometimes you just have to start again. The ideas live on!

tomhallett• 6 years ago

My goal is to write a demo app with:

- Rails

- StimilusReflex

- view_component (https://github.com/github/view_component)

- Web components

With these 4, it divides responsibilities very cleanly/pragmatically: Rails is your app framework. view_component is how you divide your view into an organized/flexible structure. StimilusReflex is the "reflexive" bridge between the 2.

What happens when you need just a sprinkle of javascript to re-render a component when websockets/StimilusReflex are too slow (ie: user interacting with a color picker or something)? You could use Stimilus.js to sprinkle this interactivity... BUT you might end up with duplication between your view_components and your Stimilus.js controller. If you use webcomponents, then you can follow the open/closed rule: Your view_component can only interact with your custom webcomponent and then your webcomponent knows how to render/re-render those custom bits. So it doesn't matter if that webcomponent is rendered from: initial page load, StimilusReflex, or rapid js events (before they are throttled to StimilusReflex), it's all goes through the webcomponent "front door".

dchuk• 6 years ago

If you’re going to use view components, maybe check this out: https://github.com/unabridged/motion

brainbag6• 6 years ago

I've been thinking about this setup a lot but never have time to try it. Is there somewhere I can follow to be notified when you accomplish this?

nickjj3• 6 years ago

I've always been a fan of Turbolinks.

Especially since it works with every tech stack with pretty much no code changes required to your existing app. The next iteration of Turbolinks will also work for form submissions without any server side code according to what's been publicly discussed from Basecamp employees. That and partial page changes will be possible with Turblinks frames which is a huge upgrade.

A while back I made a video on the benefits of using Turbolinks and how to set it up if anyone is interested https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/improving-your-page-load-spee....

Just be mindful that Turbolinks alone isn't enough to replace a SPA. It's typically paired with Stimulus but you can pair it up with jQuery, Alpine or whatever you want when you want to do more than page transitions, form submissions and swapping content in a specific area of a page.

ssawyer06• 6 years ago

If not SPAs, and hear me out on this one, how about...

Native applications

Volundr• 6 years ago

For the last time Twitter, I am not installing your damn app!

superkuh• 6 years ago

Yup. The web is for documents.

ng124• 6 years ago

Yeah, no thanks. There's a reason we abandoned them in the first place. I've never heard of anyone who's itching to go back to Swing.

buzzerbetrayed3• 6 years ago

Are you referring to Java Swing? Because Java is not native. But please let me know if there is another Swing that is.

1337shadow• 6 years ago

I'm replacing my StimulusJS with Web Components (and my webpack with snowpack).

Turbolinks you can have with an SPA codebase that will just request/load on clicks, and post/load on forms, not a big deal either.

rizpanjwani• 6 years ago

I should have just stuck with Asp.Net Webforms all those years ago :p

waheoo• 6 years ago

Pure php, html, js, css, works ok.

rajeev-k• 6 years ago

SPA pattern has failed to simplify web development

The SPA pattern is fine, it is React Router and Redux that has overcomplicated things.

Here's an example of an app written using the MVC pattern that is way simpler than the React stack: https://github.com/Rajeev-K/eureka

It uses two very simple libs:

A 500-line router: https://github.com/Rajeev-K/mvc-router/

A 200-line templating library that uses JSX syntax: https://github.com/wisercoder/uibuilder/

dsiegel22752• 6 years ago

I suspected things were getting too complicated in this space when I read that someone wrote a 150 page book on React Router

JMTQp8lwXL• 6 years ago

This hasn't been my experience. 10 to 15 minutes of looking at React Router's documentation was enough to get started with it. The major version bumps, however, have been a little taxing. If it takes six major releases to get the paradigm right, you should've done more research before moving onto the implementation phase.

ausjke• 6 years ago

nobody really does MVC with react these days, it's all about components

Multicomp2• 6 years ago

I love working in the SAFE stack since I'm a fan of F#. Being able to develop for the web using one programming language that gets transpiled to the needed JavaScript and uses the model view update pattern with elmish makes so much sense to me.

Granted, I am allergic to developing any JavaScript myself because of how many anti JavaScript comments I have read on hacker news ;)

phaedryx• 6 years ago

I've seen a lot of SPA vs. "JavaScript sprinkles" arguments lately and I think it is a false dichotomy. You can add JavaScript interactions to a page, to existing HTML, (take a look at Vue for example) without committing to JavaScript taking over the entire page.

kumarvvr7• 6 years ago

I found Blazor to be a good middle ground between SPAs and frameworks like Django or RoR.

The problem with frameworks like Django is that they have no real concept of UI Components. They have glorified ways of copy pasting html code. The cognitive burden when creating a fairly complex app, like a set of dashboards, is very high in Django.

The reason people flock to React is because, once they develop a component, it's easy to re-use. And that is the drug that fuels them. However, the learning curve is high.

I found Blazor to be a good middle ground, because it has the concept of Pages (Razor pages), which are linked to URLs' and those pages can contain re-usable components. The framework is setup for basic site structures with a lot of options for customization. For example, you have default layout pages, that are included in every output. Great to put a basic menu and footer system.

Those working on ASP.NET MVC and like would find it a breeze to work on Blazor.

Couple that with the option of using C# for the whole application, it is very enjoyable to develop with.

I have used Angular, React and Django. Angular, for me, is too much complication for simple stuff, but perhaps works well with complex apps. However learning TS, as good as it is, was a turn-off for me. React is easy to start with, but as your app grows in complexity, it becomes hard to manage and think about various stuff like state management, routing, etc. Given choice between React and Angular, I would definitely choose React. Django is very good for sites like blogs or info pages, basically wherever there is a large amount of static content, pulled from database. Of all the above, I found Blazor to be very productive. I can also mix and match different paradigms and Dependency Injection is a god send.

pier255• 6 years ago

The fundamental problem is not that the SPA pattern is bad, is that it takes a lot of skill and effort to make a proper SPA. Obviously, skill and time are scarce resources and the result is that most SPAs are crap.

OTOH all these component based frameworks have definitely brought us a much better way to produce interactive experiences compared to the jQuery days. This is not related to SPAs at all. You can use React/Vue/etc in a multipage application. The problem is that to hydrate (make interactive) the server rendered HTML you now need to duplicate your markup between your server language and front end framework. The solution is to use the same framework in the backend and the front and write the components just once.

postpawl• 6 years ago

This discussion has happened a million times on HN and this is the most succinct explanation I’ve seen so far. Bravo

1ark• 6 years ago

Recently I got to work with hybrids.js (webcomponents) which makes the hydrate part nice. Because it is normal markup with whatever data you have on your SSR-pages. It simplified quite a bit.

pier255• 6 years ago

Very interesting! Thanks for the recommendation.

austincheney4• 6 years ago

No, it doesn’t take that much skill. I think this is the source of the problem.

The stupidity and hostile fear of originality I detect in this these comments is a very real reflection of my professional experience. This, dependence on frameworks and inability to imagine anything beyond the common SPA, really scares the shit out of me knowing I will be coming home from a military deployment soon and returning to the corporate world are scared to write code.

Whenever non programmers ask me what programming is like I tell them it’s full of the most insecure people you can ever meet. People are afraid to do their jobs, need a framework for everything, and always talk about how hard it is (when it isn’t).

sumedh2• 6 years ago

No, it doesn’t take that much skill.

That is a pretty bold statement to make.

pier255• 6 years ago

No, it doesn’t take that much skill. I think this is the source of the problem.

It does take skill to make a proper SPA not to make an SPA.

fendy30022• 6 years ago

The fundamental problem is not that the SPA pattern is bad

While it's not bad, SPA forced you to do view validation twice, one on backend and another on frontend. (Generally)

Let's say that in HN not everyone can view upvote score of comment. With classic server rendering, you can put the check on view directly (though not recommended, it's sometimes useful to cut corners) and it's guaranteed that those users won't see the score.

OTOH you can't do that with SPA, since you can easily sniff the content via API response.

bob1029• 6 years ago

On the spectrum of client-server rendering, I am leaning very far into the server-side philosophy.

Right now, we use Blazor with server-side rendering for our internal dashboards. This feels almost perfect to me. There are still some rough edges and I still have to ultimately deal in terms of HTML/JS/CSS.

I've got a side project that takes the Blazor server-side concept to the absolute extreme. But, I haven't had much time to work on it this year considering... Hoping to get back into the crusade in early 2021. Looking to pilot it as a replacement for one of our Blazor server-side apps in 2H 2021. One of the bigger objectives is to develop a web application that is perfectly auditable and secure as possible. If you render final client views on the server, you can DVR precisely what each client is experiencing. The client source can be ridiculously lightweight and betrays nothing regarding the business. My prototype currently serves a ~50kb single-file HTML payload that runs the entire show for each client. I am looking at things as deep as server-side rendering of the mouse cursor. Looking at each client as a simple event stream from the server's perspective is a really neat way to organize this problem.

kumarvvr7• 6 years ago

This feels almost perfect to me

This. This is the sentence I am going to use to describe Blazor Server from now on.

mercer19• 6 years ago

My experience with LiveView has been similar. I can highly recommend looking into Tailwind (and Tailwind UI). For me, it solved some of the pain of still having to deal with CSS and various preprocessors for it.

I can now create entire working apps using just Elixir code and the utility-style Tailwind classes within my server-side templates. I still need to write some js and css, but where LiveView reduced the need for custom js to a minimum, Tailwind did the same for css.

hnick4• 6 years ago

It's interesting to me that in video games we talk less about frameworks than we do engines. Doing a few tutorials, I was shocked at how little code I had to write these days with something like Unity or Godot.

Breakout indie success stories are often lead by artistic types, since it seems harder to teach a typical programmer to draw than to teach an artist enough code to get by. And I think the scene is richer for it.

Is there a good reason the web isn't like this? Engines, rather than frameworks, that have done the hard optimisations and made the best practice decisions for us?

solipsism• 6 years ago

How often do you deal with blitting textures into vram when working on your web applications? If not very often, that means you're building on top of a stack of software that includes a rendering engine, equivalent in many ways to Unity or Godot.

hnick4• 6 years ago

you're building on top of a stack of software that includes a rendering engine

Yes that's pretty much a web browser, isn't it? There are many types of engines, such as a business logic engine. The distinction between engine and framework is a little vague but what I'm getting at is the low-code interacting-components design approach, rather than code first. I'm wondering why that hasn't taken off.

People use Godot to create GUI apps, which has problems with the final product but in terms of workflow it works to make something functional.

jay_kyburz• 6 years ago

Probably a hard sell in the web would because it would feel like a return to WYSIWYG.

erklik• 6 years ago

A case of maintainability? Most games (although its changing these days with loot boxes, and micro-transactions) don't really change ultimately in large ways after the initial development.

A website, often these days, is an ever evolving beast forever changing and adding features to it is (apparently) imperative to ensure that the gravy train keeps flowing. Its one of the reasons why I think there's an increased focus on developer productivity in web frameworks, libraries, and tooling rather than a focus on delivering a better solution.

hnick4• 6 years ago

A case of maintainability?

A good point. I hadn't considered it. Though games are more frequently masquerading as services now too.

x3haloed• 6 years ago

Turbolinks... so it’s a less elegant implementation of [Portals](https://web.dev/hands-on-portals/)?

irrational• 6 years ago

I have a theory. In the old days web development was looked down upon by "real" programmers. But then the WWW really took off and people started moving over from the C/Java world into the world of JavaScript. These are the people that insanely complicated web development when they tried to make it as complicated as the development world they came out of.

CameronNemo• 6 years ago

Do you have evidence?

Vue and Svelte, IIRC, were authored by designers. Not C or Java programmers. Perhaps React has a different history.

skoskie3• 6 years ago

I have a theory

Pretty sure they were just sharing thoughts.

winrid4• 6 years ago

Vue is influenced by AngularJS, designed by a Java dev.

muzani• 6 years ago

JS is quite a hacky language. Trying to turn it into Java neuters some of the benefits of being hacky (I'm looking at you, Typescript).

But at some point, it's neither a hacky Lisp like language, nor is it stable like Java or C++. It's just a middle ground that does these things poorly.

It would be nice to have a new programming language from scratch built to handle all the async/reactive mess. But until then JS is our best bet.

brendanmc6• 6 years ago

I hear this so often, so as an exclusively js/ts dev I have to ask... what about this is “done poorly”?

```

try {

  return await fetch(url);

} catch (e) {

  handleError(e)

}

```

Because that (metaphorically speaking) is 90% of what I write. Throw in the occasional closure, `map()` or `reduce()`

My day to day headaches are never from TS, and always from unpredictable DOM api/layout/style behavior.

I guess I just don’t have any frame of reference for how “nice” a language can be. Is it just that JS has so many “bad parts” and footguns that I’ve gotten good at ignoring?

winrid4• 6 years ago

AngularJS was designed by a Java guy, so the argument has a little merit.

But honestly, this is because mature backend frameworks can be REALLY nice.

wvenable2• 6 years ago

Except that desktop development is actually easier, with fewer tools and frameworks, than the spaghetti that is modern web development.

obiefernandez• 6 years ago

This recent hype piece I wrote about ReactiveRails is at around 30k views and counting. In the right hands (experienced full-stack dev like yours truly) the productivity gains are off the charts.

https://medium.com/@obie/react-is-dead-long-live-reactive-ra...

brainbag6• 6 years ago

This stack is very appealing though I'm not sure it's quite fully ready for primary use. Has StimulusReflex-CableReady figured out pushing new data to the client outside of the request cycle? Last I looked there was no way to trigger a client page update from a background job for example.

hopsoft• 6 years ago

This is exactly what CableReady was built for... to update the DOM from any Ruby process (in the request cycle or not). It was designed from the beginning to update the DOM from out-of-band non-request based workflows like background jobs.

lmm6• 6 years ago

How do they do this? Well, a lot of WebSockets, in the case of Reflex and LiveView, as well as very tightly coupled server interactions. As you can see in the LiveView demo, which I highly recommend, these frameworks tend to operate sort of like reactive DOM libraries on the front end – in which the framework figures out minimal steps to transform from one state to another - except those steps are computed on the server side and then generically applied on the client side. They also do a lot more data storage & state management on the server-side, because a lot of those interactions which wouldn’t be persisted to the server are now at least communicated to the server.

Reminds me of Wicket's AJAX support, which is still the best web development experience I've ever had. You keep the state in the server-side session, when the user pushes a button you update that state and re-render those parts of the DOM that changed because of it. It dovetails nicely with the whole framework being properly component-oriented - rather than the page-oriented MVC style, you make encapsulated, reusable widgets that know what their own state is and how to render themselves based on it, and the actual top-level page becomes almost an afterthought.

devasiajoseph2• 6 years ago

I use Clojuresript with a react interface to create SPAs for data analytics UI at work. It is much simpler and easy to manage. For me developing applications with javascript tend to get complex over time as the app grows. State management is really simple in Clojurescript. I was able to create reusable components which can be ported over to new projects with little effort. I now find it much more easier to develop the front end in SPA format with CLojurescript rather than rendering the UI structure with server side stack. The app tends to act a lot more faster with SPA as you see in this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=islPRG2_1vU

randompwd4• 6 years ago

In your video, you're just hitting localhost.

devasiajoseph2• 6 years ago

This is a just a demo to show front end UI.

forgotmypw17• 6 years ago

same as before, html with progressive enhancement and graceful degradation.

as one dev working part time, i am still able to build for netscape 3 and lynx, adding from there.

sdepablos• 6 years ago

Maybe the main issue here is that while SPAs make life so much better - proper testing, immutability, one way data bindings, speed of development... - for frontenders, they make it worse for absolutely everyone else: backenders that were able to hack a passable frontend or modify a proper one; final users that deal with bigger and slower webpages; devices struggling to render websites; backends that now need way more CPU to do SRR then they ever needed with traditional websites; beginners that were able to look at the HTML & CSS of a page...

BilalBudhani2• 6 years ago

I have been using Ruby on Rails with Vue.js + Inertia.js and honestly my productivity has skyrocketed. I don't worry about writing APIs for the frontend, no need to maintain separate router on frontend and no state management required.

Using this stack I'm able to build a highly reactive apps with minimal efforts.

brainbag6• 6 years ago

Do you have any examples or favorite articles about this? I just learned about inertia from this thread and your set up is similar.

revskill• 6 years ago

Main problem with web development is the css issues, not about javascript frameworks.

randomsearch3• 6 years ago

Author seems to think the goal of SPAs was to simplify web dev, but it’s actually to allow you to build fully featured, highly interactive, apps in a browser.

What the author is really getting at, I would guess, is that front end dev is awful, due to this weird combination of the Blub issue and a historical trajectory that has caused many problems.

The blub issues is mostly simple enough to pin down. Experienced programmers know that JS is an awful language. But there’s also a tooling or SDK “blub problem”. For example, compare npm and webpack vs gradle and javac (not to defend the Java ecosystem, but it does get some things right, or more right than others).

More idiosyncratically, there’s this historical arc of encountering fundamental problems, and trying to solve them within the current constraints of the web, rather than perhaps waiting for the web to standardise and evolve. This seems to be a mixture of lack of experience outside of this ecosystem (a bit like Blub) and, for this and other reasons, fixing problems “in your app” that should be fixed in the fundamental infrastructure of the web. It feels like technical solutions to social problems or, to use another metaphor, we are patching downstream what should be fixed upstream... if you build a house on sand, it will never be robust, no matter how many layers of infrastructure you add. That’s where the complexity arises.

It’s an enlightening exercise to step back and ask how you would build SPA infrastructure if starting anew. You certainly wouldn’t use a language like JS, you certainly would want to provide visual design tools as far as possible, APIs would be replaced with standard protocols, and probably you’d use a relatively small XML for layout. So perhaps only the HTML is anything like what you’d use. There’d be no transpilation, no webpack, no polyfills, no CSS, no JS.

In fact, what you’d end up with would look remarkably similar to the dev process for a Java applet!

TacoSteemers2• 6 years ago

not to defend the Java ecosystem, but it does get some things right, or more right than others

Out of curiosity, as a Java enthusiast, I was wondering if you could give examples of what you feel is wrong?

In my HN browsing I find Java is rarely actually discussed here, though often dismissed. I don't know why.

rytill• 6 years ago

For me, Java’s ties with Oracle and the nightmare stories about complicated `MetaAbstractBaseClassFactoryClassFactory` are why I seek alternatives, or would be dismissive.

BossingAround3• 6 years ago

In my HN browsing I find Java is rarely actually discussed here, though often dismissed. I don't know why.

Personally, I feel like Java is not really as hated as some people make it out to be. It's a stable language that very few people choose for their "cool side project". At the same time, it has excellent tooling, mature and prod-ready open source frameworks, and backing of some giant companies.

This is not to say that Java is perfect. I think most dissatisfaction comes from students or junior people who are baffled by the complexity of Maven/Gradle configurations, strict project structure (where a class can be 10 directories deep), and Java's insistence on boilerplate (which is often challenged by new Java releases. Those, however, are quite rare in production; I'm starting to see Java 11 here and there but the majority of projects I've seen run 1.8).

ratww3• 6 years ago

My impression is that the design of Java the language, plus its runtime, are appreciated even by the harshest critics.

However the culture around complex frameworks and over-engineering is what most people really dislike about it.

IMO pretty much all the advantages touted by Java proponents (such as: good language design, easy of use by heterogenous teams, speed, etc) are correct, but are negated by a large part of the culture and ecosystem. The memes about humongous class names and 200-method stack traces are true when you use the popular frameworks and techniques.

Of course there are exceptions to this and this can creep into other languages too, of course.

randomsearch3• 6 years ago

Out of curiosity, as a Java enthusiast, I was wondering if you could give examples of what you feel is wrong?

I think there's a lot of criticism for Java's language design. It involves an awful lot of boiler plate, and is generally very verbose. It's also a language that forces you to use OO, and OO has received a lot of pushback over recent years - so that approach has become very unpopular.

Personally, I also think the use of so many design patterns is an attempt to compensate for what the language lacks, its reflection capabilities are flawed etc.

I don't hate on Java. For many years it was my main language. It has awesome tooling and the JVM is incredible. But I do agree with most of the criticism.

I've been learning Clojure recently and Rich Hickey's talks often begin with some motivation including criticism of Java and OO more generally, here's one such video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSdnJDO-xdg

throwaway1892623• 6 years ago

In fact, what you’d end up with would look remarkably similar to the dev process for a Java applet!

Yeah, it's increasingly clear to me that Java was just 20 years ahead of its time. Java really would make a great front end language.

People lament the complexity and size of the JVM... But these days V8 is just as bad. The complexity is a trade-off for runtime performance.

It's compiled into a compact easy to parse bitcode format similar to WASM. It's faster than JS and shares many basic design decisions. The packaging system is and always was basically a better version of NPM. It has pretty good cross-platform UI, probably the best there is outside of QT.

WASM apps are eventually going to be built identically to Java cross-platform desktop apps. Probably using Java, Go, C#

theshrike79• 6 years ago

Not even Java applets, but Silverlight.

Hoo boy it was awesome to work with. But. It came out at the wrong time. Linux was coming up as a desktop, MS was still evil. Mono was mostly a hobby project.

The backlash of trying to use "proprietary M$ crap" for web was too big of a hurdle to cross, even if the technology behind Silverlight was lightyears ahead of the drek that was Java Applets.

lmm6• 6 years ago

Probably using Java, Go, C#

I hope not. The world is finally waking up to the need for sum types. A big part of the reason Java is so hated for doing simple things in is that lacking sum types meant it had to implement a horrible "checked exception" system.

jfengel• 6 years ago

I feel like the mistake Java made was ceding the DOM to Javascript. It turned out that users like the browser and didn't particularly want either native widgets or a new system. The browser is familiar and good enough for a vast majority of tasks.

If the JVM had access to the DOM, you could write SPAs in Java and everybody would be happy. Instead Java sealed itself off separately from the browser, and Javascript went from little toys to full-blown UI applications. And then developers wanted to use the same code on both client and server so they made Node, working in the space where Java is so much clearly better.

So we end up with the worse language running the world. Fortunately, JS has finally become a mediocre language (or even a decent one with TS), and here we are.

deepstack• 6 years ago

Author seems to think the goal of SPAs was to simplify web dev, but it’s actually to allow you to build fully featured, highly interactive, apps in a browser.

Typical hipster web dev now days! Go back to the basic.

yoz-y3• 6 years ago

You certainly wouldn’t use a language like JS,

I disagree with this. You might not want to use JS but a language “like” JS such as TS or Lua would definitely be on the table. Or just JS without the biggest warts.

you certainly would want to provide visual design tools as far as possible,

I feel that the promise of visual design tools fell quite short. Issues with version control and general traceability of changes and the ultimate non feature parity with code make me think that code first interfaces are the future.

APIs would be replaced with standard protocols,

Could you elaborate what do you mean? I assume REST apis but that is basically just HTTP.

and probably you’d use a relatively small XML for layout.

As long as the language is robust enough to not move stuff around when the UI slightly changes. I feel that XML (and to an extent html) is too lax to express a programmatically created interface.

So perhaps only the HTML is anything like what you’d use. There’d be no transpilation, no webpack, no polyfills, no CSS, no JS.

In a different world you could replace these steps by compilation, compiler, backwards compatibility libraries, a styling framework and a language of choice.

I think you have shown that JS ecosystem has grown very organically. I think this is because the nature of web developers was to put stuff out rather than really think about how do make it the correct way. I believe this is because of constraints, on a native platform you had the option to go down to assembly or create a new language or paradigm. On web only the browser vendor has this power, all the dev had was JavaScript.

lmm6• 6 years ago

You might not want to use JS but a language “like” JS such as TS or Lua would definitely be on the table. Or just JS without the biggest warts.

When you remove the warts from JS there's not much left. And I'd be pretty skeptical of someone starting a new project in Lua today. I think the mainstream choice for a "blank slate" language today would look something like Swift or Kotlin; Typescript can gets close, but it still has a lot of JavaScript baggage you'd want to strip out.

I feel that the promise of visual design tools fell quite short. Issues with version control and general traceability of changes and the ultimate non feature parity with code make me think that code first interfaces are the future.

All the big UI libraries end up offering some kind of markup/constraint-based interface - which is ultimately data rather than code. And for editing that, a visual form designer makes a lot of sense. I like Qt's approach - you visually edit a markup form that's compiled into a class you can subclass, so you don't have to deal with the problems of code generation, and the markup is relatively version-control-friendly.

Could you elaborate what do you mean? I assume REST apis but that is basically just HTTP.

I'm not the person you replied to, but thrift/gRPC are a lot nicer to work with than REST APIs. Standardised protocol definitions that let you understand what kind of changes are or aren't forward/backward compatible, and no need to write a bunch of boilerplate by hand.

I think you have shown that JS ecosystem has grown very organically. I think this is because the nature of web developers was to put stuff out rather than really think about how do make it the correct way. I believe this is because of constraints, on a native platform you had the option to go down to assembly or create a new language or paradigm. On web only the browser vendor has this power, all the dev had was JavaScript.

It's the same story as "no-code" tools: IT departments won't let anyone install an application runtime, but they're happy to install a "document browser" and let it run arbitrary code. It's understandable, but depressing.

jhanschoo2• 6 years ago

What's the blub problem?

TacoSteemers2• 6 years ago

It is described here, specifically in the "The Blub Paradox" section:

http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html

My understanding is that everyone understands the features and ecosystem benefits of languages they work with, but not necessarily understands those of other languages. As a result, the value of their opinions on other languages may be mixed.

glaucon• 6 years ago

What is a "blub issue". I tried a slang dictionary but couldn't find anything. Thanks.

adamnew123456• 6 years ago

https://wiki.c2.com/?BlubParadox

The basic idea being that you know a tool that's obviously superior to a lot of alternatives, but you're blind to how different alternatives are superior to it because you can't grok the power beyond their initial "weirdness".

arcturus173• 6 years ago

Experienced programmers know that JS is an awful language

BS blanket statement.

Some - many, maybe - programmers that in all likelihood multiply your experience and talent by orders of magnitude believe it's a great language.

Not everyone working with JS is doing so with a gun to their heads.

mercer19• 6 years ago

I don't know any polyglot programmers who would consider javascript better than at least one of the other languages they use, and would ditch js for those if they had the option.

TypesScript, maybe.

tannhaeuser• 6 years ago

First thing is to identify whether you're creating a web app or a web site. The latter being characterized by content-driven approaches and workflows around HTML fragments received from editors, aggregators, syndicates, product catalogs, or other third-party sites. These sites tend to be PHP-heavy, but don't have to be; a competent markup processor or "isomorphic" web composition processor (running both server-side and in the browser such as mine based on SGML no less) is specifically designed for this purpose, with straightforward and sophisticated, HTML-aware type checking, composition, templating, and escaping. For the former category of highly interactive web apps, my recommendation would by React or Vue, based on the mindshare of these frameworks. Don't let your devs use these frameworks for the sake of padding their resumes, and try to pin down your requirements and the necessary skill profiles for your team. It might not make sense for an internal app to be created using React when this will split your team into frontenders and backenders with completely disjoint stacks, increased coordinations, and loss of agile job rotation.

can3p• 6 years ago

SPAs obviously have some positive sides, i.e. state management, but that goes with a price of increasing complexity, especially if server-side rendering is required.

In majority of cases, especially when building tools like back offices it's not what you want, you just want to be able to render forms, tables and save them in a convenient way.

I've found turbolinks + simulus.js combo to work surprisingly well. Actually, I use the only one stimulus.js controller in majority of cases - one that makes an ajax request and reloads the page (with the help of turbolinks) on success. If page load time is fast enough, the use experience is the same as if you would change the dom with js manually. Of course the requirement is that reloaded page reflects the changes.

Other stimulus.js controllers are there for the cases that don't fit into aforementioned pattern. That sounds primitive but can take you a really long way without turning your js into a a monster.

In addition to that you don't need to care about the routing, html validation just works, you can wrap existing html components and even inject react apps here and there if you really need to.

[EDIT] Forgot to say - this approach does not force any language or architecture on the server-side

danjac2• 6 years ago

I'm really liking turbolinks+stimulus. While I'd probably still reach for Vue for more intricate work there is a lot of mileage you can get out of turbolinks with a small set of stimulus controllers. It's not just for Rails either: the Changelog people use Turbolinks with Elixir/Phoenix [1] for their site, including an audio player (although not with Stimulus), and I used it for a recent side project with Django [2].

[1] https://github.com/thechangelog/changelog.com

[2] https://demo.localhub.social/

tarkin2• 6 years ago

Is the issue with SPAs or frameworks like React, Angular, Vue etc?

timdaub• 6 years ago

I'm kinda surprised that apparently we've moved on from SPAs.

I've recently started a new project with preact and an express backend, and I'm in love with the smoothness of the dev experience. Seems like all my problems have been encountered already, there's dependencies and heuristics for everything. I'm just really productive and my app looks great.

Surely, all of that wouldn't be the case, had I tried some random new technology...

mercer19• 6 years ago

I'd say this is perhaps an unknown unknown situation. I've had a wonderful time working with Preact and Express, but I wouldn't go back to it after becoming comfortable with the LiveView paradigm.

davnicwil• 6 years ago

The article mentions using frameworks with React to get features like full stack data loading. If you're interested in doing this without going all-in on a framework, you should check out React Frontload [0]

It's still opinionated, but only on the data loading part! It's just a small library that will slot into any stack. I'm the author.

[0] https://github.com/davnicwil/react-frontload

keithb-• 6 years ago

With all due respect, I don't think the question is "how do we simplify SPAs?"; I think the question is "why do we need to run any app in a browser?" Look at the work associated with the "Next Billion Users" project [1]. Most of our assumptions about how-and-why are merely based on luck-and-whim. We didn't arrive at SPAs through some elaborate Grand Design. I just don't understand what a web application offers that cannot be had with a straight client-server application. Are walled gardens and app stores really tyranny when the garden is limited to a certain company/domain? For example, if my bank offers a client-server app that is walled off from the rest of the Internet, should I consider this stifling? If I was working for this bank and developing their client-server app, should I consider this a step back in my career?

[1] https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-next-billion-user...

snikita• 6 years ago

My perspective on this question is that its convenience. If the app is something relatively simple, I just want to use it on the browser and not have to go through the steps of installing software that I probably will only use once. Also using a webapp is less dangerous than installing a program in the sense that it can't read your files, install malware, etc. I can relatively safely use an unknown webapp with confidence, but I would only install a program on my actual computer if I trust the author of it.

a_imho2• 6 years ago

There is nothing wrong with reloading a page. Hackernews is doing it. On the other hand a page not working because webdevs deemed your browser outdated really is problematic.

darkhorse13• 6 years ago

This is something I really struggle to understand about the modern web dev mentality. What is exactly so bad about reloading a page? You get visual cues that the browser is doing work, and the page you requested is being downloaded. On the other hand, some SPAs literally provide zero cue when a route has been changed, which is just awful UX to me.

a_imho2• 6 years ago

Agreed. For the most part I don't really care, the target audience of those services is probably people who put up with that kind of bullshit. But there are cases when functionality and compatibility should trump everything e.g. banking software or e-governance.

CodeWriter23• 6 years ago

Oh of course the answer is shiny new framework of the week.

exabrial• 6 years ago

There are very few SPAs that are tolerable. Even Google can't make a good one, their admin console for GSuite is terrible and has latency out of this world.

ryansolid• 6 years ago

It's worth pointing out MarkoJS it was basically made for this case for eBay's eCommerce solution. It predates the Next.js of the world but offers similar experience except it's MPA first mentality with seamless isomorphic experience and full working partial hydration for years.

https://medium.com/@mlrawlings/maybe-you-dont-need-that-spa-...

nph5667• 6 years ago

After 50 years of software development people still a) are surprised that a framework/approach fails to simplify the software development and b) suggest a new framework/approach.

If Not SPAs, What?

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