[digitalarborist]

I don't think custom backends are going away either, I do think it will become way less prevalent then it is today though, similarly how all programs used to do manual memory management, this hasn't gone away but most programmers now rely on garbage collection.

So much of backend work is redundant, login, user info management, allowing the creation of groups of users, user following, user data uploading or sharing. Not to mention all the DevOps, managing CloudFormation scripts, VPCs, proxies, load balancing, dns, ssl, cdn, database schema, the list goes on, and that's before there has been any original development at all.

With react native and electron (I haven't found the atom browser or vs code weirdly restricted) the web stack is moving into desktop territory and with serverless frameworks becoming more prevelent hopefully this will make writing original software easier with less redundant work.

As to your point about data processing needing a custom backend, I see the exact opposite. Generally all this data is just funneled into a generic hadoop cluster and can be manipulated any which way from there using spark or any number of data analysis tools.

[mrweasel]

>So much of backend work is redundant

True, but that's been the case for 10 or 15 years now. Most of the applications we develop are just CRUD applications... with a twist.

There seems to always be some detail that prevents you from having a generic backend. I mean look at something like SAP. It's an off the self application, it pretty much contains everything you'd imagine needing for running a large business. Yet every single installation is customized like you wouldn't believe.

Most of the stuff you mention isn't making the backend go away, it just makes it a little easier to implement and run. Just throwing EVERYTHING into a Hadoop cluster seems... careless. You'd still need to validate that whatever the client sent is actually any good. Otherwise you're potentially polluting your data. I don't believe in client side validation as something that provides any kind of usefulness, beyond giving helpful hints to the user.

[digitalarborist]

I agree the backend can't be truly generic, there will always need to be config. But the config which provides the customizations could be made arbitrarily more simple.

The backend can't truly go away because it's always going to be managed by somebody, AWS, App Engine, Azure, etc. From the developers point of view though, running systems on these platforms could be made easier to implement and run to the point of being effortless.

I didn't mean to suggest tossing out server side validation. Though now that you mention it, if you wanted to, you could just toss every request into Hadoop, it's not polluting your data because the metadata associated with it indicates each is a request, and nothing more. When it gets to be too much, you could flush it, or do whatever you want with it.

[rimantas]

With react native and electron web stack is running in circles.

How many times should this be repeated: web stack is easier to write only if you don't know shit of the native SDKs. Otherwise it does not even compare.

[sotojuan]

Well yeah... that's the point of React Native isn't it? For people who don't know Swift or Objective-C and want an iPhone app. React Native apps are faster to write for them and perform well.

I can't comment on how they compare with native iOS apps.

[vonmoltke]

> How many times should this be repeated: web stack is easier to write only if you don't know shit of the native SDKs. Otherwise it does not even compare.

It's a hell of a lot easier than native SDKs when you need to support multiple different client platforms. This is coming from someone who would rather not have to deal with GUIs at all.

[sontek]

Things like react-native and electron aren't becoming popular because people think they are better than writing native, they are becoming popular because of the dream of "write once, run everywhere".

Most people are already developing a webstack and if they have the ability to re-use code on their mobile/desktop apps then that is a win for everyone. If you are writing 100% mobile app then you probably aren't reaching for react-native.