I’m glad this technique is making a comeback. The last 10 years of JavaScript on the client have been an utter shit show that left me wondering wtf people were thinking.
You have the benefit of hindsight at this time. You can draw parallel to history of flight and all the crazy contraptions that people attempted. Great technology can emerge from the combination of numerous shit shows. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
People have been pointing out it's a shit show with no end in sight for the entire duration of the phase. Pointing out the performance impact and cost to end users, how diabolical it is for those on lower latency or poorer network connectivity (i.e. most of the world), and so on.
Same thing as always happens with these pendulum swings, newer engineers come in convinced everyone before them is an idiot, are capable of building their new thing and hyping it up such that other newer engineers are sold on it while the "old guard" effectively says "please listen to me, there's good reasons why we don't do it this way" and get ignored. Worse, they'll get told they're wrong, only to be proven right all along.
I'm not denying there are obstructionist greybeard types that just refuse to acknowledge merits in new approaches, but any and all critique is written off as being cut from the same cloth.
It's perfectly possible to iterate on new ideas and approaches while not throwing away what we've spent decades learning ('Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it'), but tech just seems especially determined not to grow up.
I guess I've become a grey beard. I've done the whole journey from CGI everything to a bit of js to SPA. As much as I'd really like to be nostalgic about the good old days, there are reasons everything got pushed into the client. One of those reasons is maintaining state.
"HTML over the wire" isn't really a return to the good ol' days. It's still the client maintaining state and using tons of js to move data back and forth without page reloads. It just changes the nature of 1/2 the data and moves the burden of templating back to the server.
It is amusing that they make a claim that reads a lot like "eliminate 80% of your Javascript and replace it with Stimulus". What is Stimulus? A Javascript framework.
I'm not a front end engineer, but it always seemed crazy to me. I remember testing out the Google Web Toolkit when it came out more than a decade ago, and the craziest thing about it to me wasn't the Java --> JavaScript compilation, it was that the server just dumped an empty page and filled everything in with JavaScript on the client.
Then, remember the awful awful #! URLs? Atrocious, and seemed like obviously a terrible idea from the start, yet they spread, and have mostly died, thankfully. But even with the lessons from these bad tech designs, new frameworks come out that repeat mistakes, yet get incredible hype.
Hashbangs preclude even the option of the server even seeing the state that the client wants from the first request, necessitating severa hops. PushState, though it allows URL transitions without a full reload, is an entirely better and different idea.
Around the time that GWT came out, offshoring was a big thing. And most of the contractors only knew Java. Also Java was the trusted language and javascript was not.
The only big GWT project I've ever been on was a governmental project that I won't go into (because it's Danish and I would have to describe a bunch of stuff that everyone in Denmark knows and nobody outside would probably care about), but the company providing it was porting their Java version to JavaScript and had a significantly large codebase to leverage.
AWS used to rely on JWT for their consoles (haven't for a few years now, most folks migrated away some 5 years ago)
It's why they used to be horrendously bloated with large javascript bundles that took so long to process on the client side.
Roughly speaking the idea was "We don't have any Javascript developers, but we do have Java developers. JWT allows us to bridge that divide". Neat in theory, and an understandable decision, but diabolical in practice!
Very true. I think that mostly, web dev mainstream has taken a rational path. It’s with the benefit of hindsight as you say, or the yoke of unusual requirements, that people now say ”we did it all wrong”.
I think it's less about loving JS so much, and more about not having any options on the client. If there were any better client options they might have won!
The node runtime is actually pretty quick (It's roughly as fast as an optimizing compiler from 10-15 years ago, give or take, which is fairly impressive), but even TS is still makeup on a wart - you can't escape JS's more bizarre semantics that easily.
Yeah people shouldn't make applications in programming languages. If your application can't be made with html/css then it's bloatware. All this java, .net and C are totally unnecessary.
I don’t think the problem is with programming languages, but with JavaScript specifically, since it was never designed to be stretched this far. TypeScript is an improvement, but if you could write C or whatever on the client side and run it as easily as JS I think more people would go that route.
C/C++ and Rust actually run very fine client side nowadays. However, it's just more cumbersome to make UI in those languages, so it's mostly used to port existing libs or for performance.
They are, look at the context of what they're saying. JS is simply a programming language in a VM like plenty of others, there's nothing inherently bad about it. But every thread here's the uneducated hate for it, completely misunderstanding that html/css static pages don't solve the problems a programming language does.
I'd like to see these people make applications in pure XML. No programming.
No, the argument has never been "replace all JS with static HTML/CSS". The argument is "JavaScript frontends are becoming unnecessarily bloated, slow, and complicated, and we can do better". Solutions like the one Basecamp is proposing with Hotwire include pushing as much rendering logic as possible to the server, where you're using a language like Ruby for logic. Nobody thinks you can just remove all logic from a web application unless it's literally just static content.
And even with Hotwire, you're not getting rid of JavaScript entirely. You can write it with Stimulus. The idea is just that frontend web development has become a mess, and it's possible to simplify things.
“Bloated.” This is actually the opposite. Go into a language like python and install numpy (30mb) and then come back to complain to me about a 2mb js bundle.
This argument is so bogus if you look at alternative language dependency sizes.
While there are issues within Python side, I think it is quite unfair to use numpy as an example.
My reasoning is that the numpy project is meant for scientific and prototyping purposes, but many times people are using it as an shortcut and include the whole thing into their project.
That being said, the quality in these packages does vary depending on who developed them. But I think this is a problem that exists with all languages where publishing packages is relatively straightforward.
The bad experiences stick out to people, whereas all the well behaved JS-heavy apps out there likely don't even register as such to most people.
Even with SPAs, it's very possible (and really not that hard) to make them behave well. Logically, even a large SPA should use less overall data than a comparable server-rendered app over time. A JS bundle is a bigger initial hit but will be cached, leaving only the data and any chunks you don't have cached yet to come over the wire as you navigate around. A server-rendered app needs to transmit the entire HTML document on every single page load.
Of course, when you see things like the newer React-based reddit, which chugs on any hardware I have to throw at it, I can sort of see where people's complaints come from.