
Ask HN: Has web development really become easier than 10 years ago? - danielovichdk
The last 20 years doing consultency, building web applications, the time spend on frontend development seems to be explodong in complexibilty. Not so much feature wise, more technology wise. There is so much noise in that end of the development pipeline that I have a hard time understanding or really seing the value.<p>So many web applications seems to me to be filled with too much junk (packages, bundlers etc) without really adding value.
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oblib
Yeah, I came to about the same conclusion not long ago when reviewing the
latest crop of frameworks at TodoMVC.com while looking for the "best" way to
build new apps.

I ended up not being able to conclude what was "best" so I decided to look for
the "easiest" way instead. That was a lot easier because it's a fluid
approach.

While I appreciate the goals of a single page app I would never make that a
requirement when designing one. I'll use it where it easily works and not when
it doesn't.

There are countless ways to make an app but in the end productivity is what
gets it shipped and pays the bills and the easiest way is almost always the
most productive.

Right now jQuery and Bootstrap are probably the easiest way to build a front
end and unless you really need something more it's hard to argue against not
using them if productivity is accounted for.

That, of course, will vary with one's own experience. If you've spent the time
learning how to use React or Angular you might be more productive with that,
but I'm thinking probably not, or not much, in most cases. What you really may
be doing is addressing efficiency issues and other problems you don't have,
and possibly adding unnecessary complexity.

If your app ever gets to where it doesn't work for you because you have so
many users it needs to be more efficient, then good for you, you've hit the
big time and should invest in efficiencies appropriate to scale, but you may
find that's not a problem, or not where the problem resides.

Software is no different than anything else when it comes to applying the
"KISS" approach and the more complex the project the more important that
becomes.

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the_prepared
Certain pockets will get better, which is natural over time in the tech
community.

But then as some things get routine, new things pop up or focus changes into
fancy UX, etc etc.

So the net effect might be a wash in terms of hours / investment, even though
things that were hard 10 years ago no longer are.

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thosakwe
To be fair, I haven't been doing Web dev for 10 years, but I definitely agree
that frontend development is incredibly time-consuming.

Especially if you're trying to build something alone, I find it really
impractical.

IMO, not every Web application needs to be an SPA. Depending on the scale of
your app, it might benefit you greatly (like if you're Facebook or Google,
etc.), but often times you can get away just fine with server-side templating
engines or otherwise.

~~~
dozzie
> IMO, not every Web application needs to be an SPA.

Actually, it goes like this:

\- not every website needs to be dynamic

\- few dynamic websites need to be _applications_

\- and very few webapplications need to be SPA

Though it would be very boring (as nearly all work that is valuable), and thus
we have proliferation of SPAs that present static text.

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onion2k
_...without really adding value_

My go-to example of why build tools are essential is subresource integrity
hashing. If adding a hash was a manual process every time you had to deploy a
new version of a site then no developer would bother, and the user's security
would suffer for it. With Webpack (or any of its peers) it's a matter of
installing an NPM module and adding it to the plugins configuration. That's
it. That's a _huge_ amount of value for practically no effort. Writing new
plugins is hard, but few developers ever need to do that.

I spent 3 days learning the basics of Webpack and I've never looked back. It's
a _fantastic_ tool that any modern web developer ought to know.

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draw_down
Well, we do things now that we didn’t used to do, like write tests :) More is
expected in the way of features, not in terms of the number of features but
how they work. Imagine clicking a tweet from your timeline, then pressing
Back, and being taken to the top of your timeline. It wouldn’t be acceptable.
But some thought and care has to be put into making that happen. Just one
example but basically there are more concerns than there used to be.

~~~
dozzie
> Well, we do things now that we didn’t used to do, like write tests :)

We didn't used to _worship_ tests. We used to write them, mainly for detecting
regressions. Perl's CPAN society developed whole standards around testing
(ever heard of Test Anything Protocol?), and that was in the late '80s.

~~~
draw_down
OK, but JS used to just be straight-up untested, except perhaps in end-to-end
tests which even then would be extremely brittle. We didn't test, really.

