
Ask HN: Are we over-engineering front-end development? - zabana
A lot of blog posts related to front end development cover technologies like react, vue and angular. Some companies even &quot;&quot;brag&quot;&quot; about using said technologies. But when using their products, I fail to see the reasons that warranted their decision. (&quot;It could&#x27;ve been done using jquery&#x2F;ajax and simple PHP backend&quot; is what I usually think.)<p>My question therefore is this:<p>Are we falling for the &quot;shiny new toy&quot; syndrome ? At what level of complexity should a company start considering a switch to a modern front-end framework ?<p>Thanks
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tonysickpony
I think yes we are actually over-engineering front-end development at the
moment, and I think part of the reason is we are under-engineering on unified
standard and toolings in front-end realm. The ever fast progressing in web
platform concepts has surpassed the speed of advancements in the platform
(mostly browsers) and development environments. Therefore what used to be as
simple as an <a href> now could very well be 200 LOC of history state
manipulation and observation, what in other programming language is out-of-the
box with fresh install or IDE integration is a few hours of webpack config and
everyone is different from everyone. In short I think the cause of notorious
front-end development is the non-unified status quo. Can't say it is whether a
good sign or bad, it may be the price we have to pay to evolve, or maybe we
overpaid already.

That has been said. To answer your question, I think if user experience is not
high on priority and there isn't much point re-use a lot of UI code, the
company is fine with back-end framework and many do. I do believe front-end
framework provide many benefits, code re-usability, loose coupling from back-
end code, easy for team collaboration, such and such. Company should only
switch to them for reasons not the fuzz it generates.

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fiiv
Frontend applications get more elaborate and smart every day. Part of it is
that expectations are higher and higher as well. It is expected for a lot of
products that when they launch, they handle complex application state, keep
data on refresh, sync everything, give immediate and relevant user feedback,
etc. And of course devs don't want to use yesterday's language so complex
build tools that transpile newest versions of JS are a given.

Sure, you could build something with jQuery and a PHP backend, and a lot of
people manage to pull this off. But you would either re-invent the wheel for
some of those features or you'd end up using jQuery plugins to do it for you,
which basically is the same as using a module.

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zabana
Interesting perspective. I didn't think about it that way. But it only
answered the second part of my question. My observation was more about "less
elaborate" products needlessly adding complexity to their architecture because
"the other cool kids" do it. (I've been guilty of this myself so It's not an
attack on anybody that does this)

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fiiv
That point I wholeheartedly agree with you on. I guess it's feature envy ;)

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gigatexal
I think so. The barrier to entry is needlessly high.

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dormento
Massively so, yes. However, it is a sign of the times - people expect
interactive, practical apps, and stakeholders expect faster delivery and
development.

I only wish it were unavoidable.

