The Sad State of Web Development is an interesting if slightly ranty read about the current state of web technologies. Some interesting points worthy of consideration, even if you decide you disagree with them. If you read it, you should probably take one of the final sentences into consideration before getting angry if you happen to think his opinions are wrong:
I originally wrote this anonymously. Yea I was pretty frustrated. It’s all good. Let’s ship some awesome stuff for people!
One of my favourite (and most quotable) bits is the portion on SPAs:
Don’t fucking build a SPA
Really all I’m saying is don’t build a SPA. A SPA will lock you into a framework that has the shelf life of a hamster dump. When you think you need a SPA, just stop thinking. Just don’t. Your users just don’t fucking care.
If I see a section on my app that is really hard to with Pjax/Turbolinks and jQuery, I’ll bring in a library/framework like Vue.js, *cough* React, Angular. All good choices for doing really complex forms(although I find Angular to be the best at this), with a ton of conditional validation. You know what though, these are the outliers in my experience, not the norm.
Maybe 1 or 2 pages on your app will have really complex UI, but the other 95% of the app does not. So you pay a huge penalty doing a SPA. You’re typically writing all the basic CRUD stuff in a SPA from scratch. The backend framework you’re using can’t help you in any way. So my advice is to use Rails, Django, Play Framework, Laravel, or Phoenix to develop most of the app, because they help you with most of the boilerplate stuff, and bring in the flavor of the month on a page that needs it. So when the next flavor of the month comes out you’re entire app is not knee deep in the last flavor of the month. You can just re write that one page.
Posted on Sunday, January 24, 2016 2:06 PM |