[exodust]

Is there a "too clever" mentality in frontend web dev culture of late? An overly fragmented workflow toolset?

Not sure the cause, perhaps the influx of engineering "computer science disciplined" brains into the frontend world. Or a panicked competitive race to achieve a nirvana dev environment. Or a tendency to think that workflows for large websites with countless modules is the best workflow for a one-page web app.

Overkill for the intended task, or cluttering your project with too much technology, is the thing to watch out for in the frontend aspect.

Layers of tools and libraries and plugins can easily get out of control and beyond a joke. Don't forget you've got a web app to build while you mess around with the "right way" to build it.

You do not need a cup-holder on your scaffolding.

Just using plain JS with Jquery, and perhaps some additional smaller specific plugins/libraires, is enough to do a lot of cool stuff if we're talking "javascript" projects. Then just get a good editor and off you go.

[marknutter]

> Just using plain JS with Jquery, and perhaps some additional smaller specific plugins/libraires, is enough to do a lot of cool stuff if we're talking "javascript" projects. Then just get a good editor and off you go.

These new tools and frameworks are becoming numerous and popular precisely because for large, complicated front-end applications you can't just get away with using "plain JS with Jquery" without it becoming an unmaintainable mess and writing boilerplate DOM manipulation code all over the place. The only people I meet who have an aversion to these modern JS frameworks are front-end devs who refuse to learn them or server-side devs who hate javascript.

[exodust]

> you can't just get away with using "plain JS with Jquery" without it becoming an unmaintainable mess and writing boilerplate DOM manipulation code all over the place.

Nonsense. Maintainability is all about good documentation, neat code, sensible peer-reviewed code, a good dose of manual testing and a healthy injection of personal responsibility in seeing the project be the best it can be for your users.

I test my work manually on a bunch of test devices and computers I own. It doesn't take long and I get to see any browser specific display glitches that automation tools wouldn't pick up. It's a no-brainer, and you LEARN about the nature of browsers by testing manually.

I hate bootstrap, don't use it. I've made big website templates with lots of traffic, and smaller components and other things. I don't want bootstrap in the mix thanks. Whenever I have to maintain a project which someone else started with bootstrap, I sigh and dive into the ridiculous use of simulated rows and columns, and the crappy CSS overrides meant to give us flexibility, but actually giving us not much at all.

So how do other developers like my work when they have to maintain it? Well, I leave them something SIMPLE and well documented to decipher, so they can get straight to work doing the maintenance and getting on with business. No learning curves of countless toolsets and pre-processing junk. Just the basics. I've had no complaints.

Frontend is very much concerned with visual elements and interaction. I don't know much about server side except for what I find behind the projects I work on and fetch with AJAX or other means... such and such data feeds, this or that outputs etc. I'm more interested in user interfaces and how a web app or webpage "feels". I know exactly what to do when something doesn't feel snappy, or a graphic flashes or renders poorly on load. I know what to do because I haven't sold my soul to a framework that promised me the world, but delivered mediocrity.

Each to their own.

[Silhouette]

These new tools and frameworks are becoming numerous and popular precisely because for large, complicated front-end applications you can't just get away with using "plain JS with Jquery" without it becoming an unmaintainable mess and writing boilerplate DOM manipulation code all over the place.

That's a rather negative view, and I don't think it's entirely realistic. I am involved with multiple long-running web projects that have been using things like (real) MVC architectures and single-page applications since long before any of these trendy JS frameworks existed. The projects have been built using sound software development principles and usually a small number of carefully chosen supporting tools and libraries. They are still doing their jobs just fine, and they have stood the test of time in terms of maintainability.

The only people I meet who have an aversion to these modern JS frameworks are front-end devs who refuse to learn them or server-side devs who hate javascript.

Please consider that there is at least one more option, which I imagine applies to many of the older readers here. Some of us have seen before the rapid evolution of an ecosystem as a programming language takes off, and we simply don't buy the hype.

We saw the arrival of Java, with all its garbage collected wonder. Then we saw the nightmarish descent into over-engineered hell that followed.

We saw the arrival of Boost for C++ and the potential of community-developed, peer-reviewed libraries. Then we noticed that in 2014, C++ still doesn't even have basic features for working with filesystems or rendering a simple UI as standard.

We saw the evolution of very dynamic "scripting" languages like Python and Ruby into widely used server-side languages for real applications. Then we saw people trying to maintain those applications a few years later, when they weren't prototypes any more and when quality and performance mattered.

More recently, we've seen front-end web development shift toward JavaScript and move away from the likes of ActiveX controls, Flash plug-ins and Java applets, as language support became more consistent across browsers and some real effort went into improving performance. Today we are also seeing the inevitable explosion of the surrounding ecosystem as JS becomes a tool for building more heavyweight software, signalled by the arrival of vast numbers of different automation tools and libraries and frameworks.

But with the cynicism of the industry veteran, we also see that many of these new tools will do 80% of a job easily but make the last 20% much more painful. We know that some are merely short cuts aimed at people who now work in front-end development but whose backgrounds aren't necessarily in programming and who haven't yet developed their general software development skills in that way; there's nothing wrong with that, of course, but such tools have no (or negative) value to those who have moved beyond the level where they are helpful. Most of all, we know that five years from now, as the ecosystem evolves standards and consolidates, it is highly unlikely that most of the currently trendy tools will still be as effective and well maintained as they are today, but that like the five-year-old projects some of us work with today, someone will still have to maintain those projects after all the hypesters have moved on.

This doesn't mean that we somehow refuse to learn new technologies. It just means that if I can see what looks like a fire, and it feels as warm as I expect when I get close enough to examine it, I'm not still going to jump in for a few minutes just to see if it's really as hot as it looks because I read on a web site somewhere that all the cool kids were doing it.

Now get off my lawn. :-)

[marknutter]

> We know that some are merely short cuts aimed at people who now work in front-end development but whose backgrounds aren't necessarily in programming and who haven't yet developed their general software development skills in that way; there's nothing wrong with that, of course, but such tools have no (or negative) value to those who have moved beyond the level where they are helpful.

No, they are aimed at people who have worked in front-end development for a long time and whose backgrounds are in programming precisely because they are sick of reinventing the wheel every time they start a new project and are able to understand the technical value behind concepts modern frameworks give us like dependency injection, unit/e2e testing, modularity, and separation of concerns. The myth that front-end developers are not "necessarily from a programming background" is poisonous thinking and it unfortunately usually comes from older programmers or non-front-end developers; the very people who could help guide the front-end world into maturity.

[Silhouette]

sick of reinventing the wheel every time they start a new project and are able to understand the technical value behind concepts modern frameworks give us like dependency injection, unit/e2e testing, modularity, and separation of concerns.

You write as if we didn't understand the technical value of those things before a couple of years ago when the current crop of JS frameworks arrived, and as if using one of those frameworks is somehow necessary to achieve them.

In reality, everything you mentioned has been widespread in other software development fields for decades. It's stuff the junior guy on the team learns in his first few months.

Moreover, I think there is a reasonable argument that of your chosen examples, testing is the only one that has sufficiently common requirements for building large but general tools to be worthwhile. The other design principles are valuable, but how best to use them will be highly project-specific, and therefore any widely useful framework will tend to be over-engineered and over-generalised for most applications. See also the Java nightmare I mentioned previously, the trend toward lightweight frameworks on the server side, etc.

Edited to add:

The myth that front-end developers are not "necessarily from a programming background" is poisonous thinking and it unfortunately usually comes from older programmers or non-front-end developers; the very people who could help guide the front-end world into maturity.

There is a difficulty in the industry that significant numbers of people are coming into this kind of front-end development from some sort of HTML/CSS and/or design background. They used to use a bit of JS here and there that they copied off a demo site to get their buttons to animate, and now they're being asked to move into more of a mainstream programming role, but neither they nor the people asking them necessarily appreciate what that involves.

That's not anyone's fault. It will be fixed over time as the industry matures, both because knowledge will spread and because more specialised roles than "front end developer" will probably evolve. But right now, today, it is the situation in large parts of the industry.

[acjohnson55]

I think that's a naive way of thinking about the problem. Do people write rich server-side web apps in Plain Ol' Python? Of course not. Why reinvent the wheel?

For a tiny app, sure, maybe it's not so bad to just use jQuery. But if you're working on something with a very rich front-end architecture, a framework gives you a very necessary...er...framework to use to eliminate boilerplate and organize your work. Not only that, but you get to minimize your code debt to your actual business logic, not the plumbing.

[exodust]

Maybe people are trying to avoid work? If that's the case, be careful losing your innovative and creative edge from being shackled to an interlocking formula of tools and frameworks.

This debate feels loose. We are lucky to have so many options. It all depends what project you're working on.

I prefer rich possibilities in design and functionality rather than rich possibilities in minimising how much I have to think/solve/innovate. I don't want a crutch, I want a turbo boost of creativity in web development... and that comes from hard work, not automating your life.

These tools are often about slapping the same old stuff down day in day out. Where's the fun in that?

Am I re-inventing the wheel? Spreading boilerplate code around in a mess? No I am not. My boilerplate code is nicely organised and easily deployed thanks very much! And the wheels.. well, the wheels I make are lightweight, and I know and trust them inside out. They're my wheels. I made them, and they stand out from the crowd.

[Silhouette]

Do people write rich server-side web apps in Plain Ol' Python?

Perhaps not, but plenty of us write them using a lightweight framework like Flask rather than heavyweights like Django, and even in a relatively mature field like ORMs, there are downsides to using them that sometimes outweigh the advantages.

For a tiny app, sure, maybe it's not so bad to just use jQuery.

I've got ~100,000 lines (before minimising etc.) and ~5 years of successful maintenance "just using jQuery" for one web app that I can quickly check from here that is still going strong. I think most of us would agree that's not a tiny single page application.

[lmm]

How many lines would it be if it used a good framework?

IME any application which grows that large without using a framework ends up inventing its own. If the code's maintainable by people other than its original author you've presumably separated the routing code from the template rendering code (and have a module that's effectively a generic template renderer) from the backend service access (and again, probably have a module that's some kind of generic service access layer). You'll have a set of utility functions that's more or less equivalent to underscore. And so on.

[Silhouette]

How many lines would it be if it used a good framework?

I don't know. That project has no direct equivalent to any of the current frameworks, other than approximately following MVC for its overall architecture and using message passing/publish-subscribe in various places to keep things modular and testable.

I imagine you could achieve some of the same behaviour using data binding tools in modern frameworks, but either way you're typically looking at a little boilerplate to connect things up in the first place and then one-liners to connect individual fields from a model to the corresponding parts of the DOM. It's not clear whether there would be any savings at all, but if there were, they wouldn't be significant for any framework I've considered so far. In any case, that represents a tiny fraction of the overall code base for this application.

IME any application which grows that large without using a framework ends up inventing its own.

All software has an architecture, sure. As with any framework vs. library debate, you're trading off the benefits of having some of that architecture predetermined for you and having some of the laborious plumbing work dealt with automatically against the overhead of managing a major external dependency and any extra costs you incur if you need to do something that goes against its natural capabilities. Sometimes using a framework is a win, and sometimes it isn't.

If the code's maintainable by people other than its original author you've presumably ...

You've made some assumptions there about how web apps work, but they aren't necessarily true.

For example, much of the complexity in this particular UI comes from providing many views of the same underlying model. Some of them are graphical rather than text/form based. Some of those rely on intermediate cached data structures for their source data because rerendering an entire view from the raw data in the model can be prohibitively slow. We have an efficient and simple architecture using the same basic principles as MVC for dealing with this kind of caching. We'd derive very little benefit here from the kinds of data-binding and template-rendering functionality found in the major frameworks.

Just to be clear, libraries designed to render interactive graphical page elements efficiently, allowing for portability across browsers and different image/scene formats, are another question entirely. I'm not arguing for reinventing the wheel or arguing against using tried-and-tested code from external sources. I'm just arguing that it should only be done when the benefits outweigh the costs, and that this won't necessarily be the case when considering whether or not to use one of the modern JS frameworks as the foundation for your web app.

[acjohnson55]

That's great, but it sounds like this project predates the modern frameworks. It probably doesn't make sense to try to shoehorn it into a framework at this point. But to write 100,000 of framework-less JS today on a green field project seems ridiculous. 5 years ago, some person was probably bragging about their 100,000 line app built without jQuery. 5 years from now, someone will be bragging about how all they use is Backbone.

[Silhouette]

But to write 100,000 of framework-less JS today on a green field project seems ridiculous.

Why? I've worked on non-web software projects 1-2 orders of magnitude bigger that didn't need anyone's magical framework to develop and maintain a sound architecture. How come we can't just use good design that fits the project if the software we're writing happens to be the front end for a web app?

It's about picking the right tool for the job, the same as always. For some projects and some development teams, I'm sure these modern JS frameworks and tools have proved valuable and will continue to do so. On the other hand, we're currently planning another web app that is expected to grow at least as big as the one I described earlier, and no-one on the team is seriously considering using any of the current crop of front-end frameworks. That's not because we don't know what they do or how they work. It's simply because none of us thinks it's a smart idea to build such a large and hopefully long-running project with a fundamental dependency on the kind of technology that typically measures its time at the top in months.

[mrmzr]

The common PHP developer mentality.