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by jaabe 2615 days ago
Well some of us think webpack/react and the rest are even worse and that a page-reload never killed anyone.

I don’t work in a tech-focused business, because I work in the public sector. That means our funding is fairly limited, even though 90% of our workforce spends 5-8 hours a day on some for of smart device or pc. Because we’re limited, however, we need to be careful about how we spend our resources, and that means we simply can’t keep up with the modern frontend environment.

If all you do is angular, then the transition from AngularJS to angular 2 might have been smooth, but it sure wasn’t for us, and neither would the big react-versions be.

We also can’t really take advantage of the package/library environment because we’re not as fault tolerant as others. We can’t have security issues, but we also can’t code-review 70 packages/libraries every week because there was an update.

As a result we’re back to using the old MVC frameworks that don’t change every day and have solid standard libraries. We did buy a frontend “platform” so we can have things like editable grids without constant page-reloads, but in general, JS is something we add to a specific component only if it’s absolutely necessary.

I am looking forward to when Flutter finally has the ability to build websites. Because then we’ll have both mobile platforms, web and desktop frontends covered in one tool. Which is frankly exactly what we need to be productive in 2019, that or we’d need to hire 2-3 people, and the latter is just not happening.

1 comments

As a front-end developer it sounds just like the perfect job for me. I'm so tired of fighting the infrastructure and tooling instead of doing real work that I wish I could go back in time to work in simple MVC project. I don't really care if it's Rails, Django, PHP, .NET or Java. On my previous 4 jobs I wrote SPAs for products that weren't supposed to be a SPA. I wonder if there are still interesting products being built with these 'old' tech. Where I live certainly there isn't.