[caspper69]

I don't mean to be obtuse, so let me make sure I have this right (and please afford me some leeway on my gentle ribbing, I assure you it's all in good fun and nothing personal):

A framework will allow me to separate the app from its backend?

The web, by its very nature, runs on a client/server architecture, so it has long been possible to separate the front from the backend via an API (we can argue the level of difficulty involved, but I would say the friction was substantially reduced with the introduction of XMLHttpRequest).

So aside from separation via API, according to your list, that leaves us with (1) a bigger development team; (2) a less efficient result; (3) a potentially more polished result (I added possibly, because I'm dubious about the claim that a JS framework makes the result more polished- does it make the browser render the HTML components in a higher resolution or higher color bit-depth?); (4) someone on call (like an employee or group of employees who have to be on call at all times? or am I misunderstanding?); and (5) a better "bus factor" which is a term that I am actually unfamiliar with (is this jargon, or is it an actual technical term/concept?).

Which of these are technical in nature, or rather I should say, which of these factors has anything to do with software (in the abstract) or actual code or markup (in the concrete)?

Now for my more serious follow up: just level with me; is this all bs? Do people use these frameworks because they don't know any other way to do it? Is it a code / organizational issue? Did people take the "separate all code from all HTML/CSS" advice too far and adopt it as dogma? Do people find the event model in JS to be too complex or unreliable? Is it an issue of people getting hooked on frameworks while JS was in flux so they needed the polyfills? Is it that people fell in love with TS, which naturally led to framework-itis?

I feel kind of like I went to the future, and everybody rides exercise bikes everywhere they go to stay in shape, but since exercise bikes don't go anywhere, they have to be put in the bed of a pickup truck first, you know, to actually go places, but then there was a gas shortage, so it was decided to save gas we'd all carpool by putting 5 pickup trucks on a single semi-truck flatbed. Because that's just how things evolved.

So now you're explaining to me why I see people riding exercise bikes on top of pickup trucks that are themselves being pulled 5 at a time on the back of a semi truck, and you're looking at me like I'm out of touch because I can't figure out why you guys can't just walk the 250 feet to the store across the street.

[gigatree]

Hilarious analogy that honestly doesn’t seem that far off. But in that reality, you probably wouldn’t be able to walk to the store, much less anywhere else, because there would be all these semi trucks driving everywhere and a road-dominated country. That’s basically a dev trying to get a job today, which means they’re just gonna focus on learning that whether it’s the best solution or not.

Most devs don’t use React because it’s the best tool for the job, they use it because it’s the best tool for getting a paycheck.

[caspper69]

Well we can all relate to that. We've all got to eat (and stay warm & dry).

I think I'm just getting to the "old man yells at cloud" stage of my career.

I think of all of the things that we could have built over the years, and understand, I say this not to detract from all of the great software that has been built, but to lament the fact that devs spend so much time spinning their wheels these days (when not reinventing them, or trying to fit a square one on a race car) that we have spent so much opportunity cost that could have been the next big thing or the better version of an old thing.

I would just implore people to go back and look at the history of computing, and the things we had back then (even if they were research demos or ahead-of-their-time pipe dreams), and remember that we have 100,000-1,000,000x the compute (or more) than we had when these older things were built. We can do better.

And remember, not every abstraction is a useful one, not every appeal from authority should be taken as gospel, that creating software can be one of the most creative and expressive endeavors one can undertake, that there is no greater joy than seeing people use the things you build (or help build), and that there's no such thing as perfect software (but we should always strive to get as close as reasonably possible).

[lbruder]

Hi fellow yelling old man,

would it be OK for me to steal your analogy? It's great!

In the team I'm currently leading, we have made the same observation, with stuff getting more complicated without anything substantial to show for it. In a way we're having a harder time getting out features than twenty years ago, but somehow that's "progress".

As an experiment, I had one of my juniors rewrite a (admittedly small) frontend with Go templates and HTMX, and not only did they have a blast doing it, they were surprised at how simple everything suddenly was. Give that one a try, it's worth it!

That said, there are frontends with requirements that actually do need all that framework crap. Once you want 3D stuff that a user can move around with the mouse, you pretty much have no other choice. While those special cases are rare, people prefer to learn one framework and use it for every nail they see lying around instead of looking at all the other tools in their shed...

[caspper69]

I've played with JSX a couple of times but not HTMX, and it's been a while since I wrote any Go code (pre-generics, so I've got some reading to do).

I have been looking to slap together a small blog platform, and this sounds like a perfect setup. Thanks, I appreciate the tips.

And yes, I would be honored if you used my analogy! Hopefully it can give some frustrated devs a chuckle and brighten a small part of their day.

[martinsnow]

Htmx is terrible once you have to manage state that has to live in the frontend

[krab]

Hey I'm not saying it's always a better way or that all apps should be developed in a certain way. But it's a trend, people are doing it for a reason and I think I understand why.

You asked whether some of the reasons are technical. Not in the sense that you can't do it in a simpler way, no.

Look at it from the perspective of a company that has a product and a few developers working on it. It's successful. Now a lot of requests pops up. Some are small, some are related to an obscure integration, maybe a few custom development requests from important customers, bug fixes... The company can now either say no to a big chunk of them (a fine choice), or, if it has money, it can hire more people.

Now, with more people, for them to be somehow effective, you need to create internal APIs and narrow down the focus areas of your teams. Backend/frontend is a separation layer, you're right. But I'd argue it's not that useful for this problem. If the backend emits HTML, what's the frontend work then? Styling? On the other hand, running a thick client in the browser that consumes an API makes it possible to decouple even the release cycle of the frontend from the backend.

Mind you, there are companies that are/were successful with a small team. But most often, the success is supported by large teams at the cost of technical perfection.

[chillfox]

"bus factor" is just a side benefit of having a larger dev team. The idea is if someone gets run over by a bus then you still have someone who "knows" the code to train the replacement.

[caspper69]

I like it.

I will add it to my lexicon.

Thanks!

[arkh]

More exactly, the bus factor = number of people who'd have to be hit by a bus to stop development. So the bigger your bus factor, the more secure your dev.

[MrJohz]

One thing that I've learned over time is that if I can't understand why people are taking some particularly obtuse or circuitous route, then that's probably because I don't yet understand what they're doing properly. I never really understood why people would use terminal-based text editors until I tried it out for myself, and while I still have my doubts, I understand the tradeoffs much better now. If frontend development feels as insane to you as the analogy you're describing, and yet it's one of the largest sectors of the software industry, then it seems likely that you're missing something, rather than everyone else going mad.

As you say, it has always been possible to build things where the browser-based client is separated from the backend via an explicit API. Consider an application that shows you a list of flights coming into an airport. You want it to automatically update whenever new flights come in, so you need some polling to fetch that data, and some Javascript to clone elements, fill in the details of the new flights, and insert them into the DOM. But you also want sort functionality, so you need to be able to rearrange all the elements as well. And you want to filter, so you need to be able to store all the flight information internally as state, even if those flights aren't currently being shown. And your can click on each flight to expand it and view more details about that flight, so while you're rearranging and rewriting all your flights, you also need to be keeping track of which ones are currently open or not.

This was the exact application where I first realised that all the jQuery-based DOM manipulation techniques I'd learned were not going to be enough, and that there was a lot of value in having a tool that manages keeping the DOM in sync with the application state, allowing you to focus on keeping track of that state.

There are other approaches, but in my experience, they mostly come down to building your own framework, one way or another. They don't have to be as complicated as React, or as heavyweight as Angular, but you need some system in place to help you sync your state to the DOM.

I'm not establishing here that all web development needs to take this approach, just that there are a lot of situations where it is very useful. I've ended up building and maintaining variants in the above filter/sort/details/live updates system three or four times in different contexts and with different parameters, to say nothing of other, similarly complex web apps where the system works have been unmanageable without some sort of frontend framework.

Once this starts, though, you end up with frontend developers who specialise in this kind of development, and I suspect this results in a kind of siloisation, splitting web development into frontend teams and backend teams, who can each specialise further. Backend developers no longer need to worry about that occasional time where they need to tweak some CSS or JS, and frontend developers don't need to understand databases. This in turn develops into frontend developers using their tools in a wider variety of situations, because it turns out they make a lot of web development a lot easier, not just complex state management. It's a bit like how people use git to track their dotfiles. Even though git is designed to coordinate between multiple people syncing complex branches and forks together, it turns out it also works well as a simple backup and rollback mechanism.

The result is that tools like React are probably somewhat overused, but that allows developers to specialise into broad fields like "frontend" or "backend", while also remaining very general within those fields (because most work that is frontend will use similar sorts of tools and layouts, just like how MVC will apply to most backend development, regardless of language or framework). And this also isn't universal - there are still plenty of smaller, more boutique design operations that will build websites in the more traditional way.

[caspper69]

I hope you understand that a fair bit of my second post was tongue-in-cheek.

I appreciate the concrete examples, and yes, that makes perfect sense when you start getting into data-heavy frontend applications. I do remember jQuery being useful for AJAX and for DOM selection primarily, so I get it.

And of course I knew I was missing something, that's why I asked lol, the question was serious and I knew HN wouldn't let me down.

I'm still a bit mystified about the necessity of a shadow DOM, it just seems counterintuitive to me, but perhaps it's because I'm not familiar with browsers' DOM handling conventions. Perhaps me gaining some insight there would make the purpose of a shadow DOM more clear.

Honestly, I really did figure that it had something to do with the event model (not the DOM or shadow DOM). Something about providing a more consistent apparatus for wiring and handling events.

I still think there's a lot of unnecessary spinning of the wheels on the front end, but that gets beat to death around here, so I'll let it be.

[MrJohz]

By shadow DOM do you mean the virtual DOM? The shadow DOM is also a thing, but it's largely unrelated to web frameworks.

The idea behind the virtual DOM is that it's usually easier to render everything in a functional sort of way. You treat rendering like a function that takes state as an argument, and returns your desired UI. Every time an event handler fires and changes some state somewhere, you rerun all the functions with the new state and that produces a (potentially different) UI.

For various reasons, it's not practical for these functions to actually return a new DOM every time the state changes, so instead they return the VDOM, which is a description of what the DOM should look like, and React diffs the real DOM against the VDOM and updates it if there are any changes. This way, if you've got an input that the user is typing in, it doesn't get replaced completely every time the component updates, but React might update properties on it as they change.

Originally the React team talked about how the VDOM made React faster, and this claim got stuck in everyone's heads, but it's not really true. The VDOM allows React to separate the rendering phase (i.e. when all the component render functions are called) and the DOM update phase, which can have some performance improvements against more naive approaches, but if you could optimally update the DOM directly whenever state changes, then this would still always be quicker. (And a lot of frameworks are moving towards this model, and away from the more React-like VDOM approach.) The main benefit of the VDOM is that it simplifies the programming model: it allows the "UI as a function of state" concept, and makes it easier to reason about what's happening while a render function is being executed.

A lot of more modern frameworks are moving away from VDOM-based approaches, although React is staying very much where it is. Like I said, there are faster approaches, but these arguably come with tradeoffs about complexity. Personally, I tend to avoid React because of the VDOM approach, in large part because it's a layer of abstraction that I don't really need.

[caspper69]

Yes, virtual DOM. My mistake. Not even sure why I used the term shadow DOM.

That makes sense. I understand the rationale now.

I appreciate the detailed and thoughtful response.

[MrJohz]

It's a very common mistake! No worries, I always enjoy getting to explain these details to people, I find them really interesting.

[gbuk2013]

I'm a BE dev that has do to some FE work now and again, but IIRC the shadow DOM thing is about performance: it is in theory more performant to modify the shadow tree and then send it to the browser for rendering in one go than to manipulate individual elements and have the updates render immediately.

Back in the day I had to use an escape hatch in Vue 2 (which does not have shadow DOM) to work with the DOM directly to render a fast changing component (a structured log browser window with live logs flowing in rapidly). No idea if React would have worked better though. :)