[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.