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| | Ask HN: Why Isn't the Construction of CRUD Web UIs 90% Automated? | |
201 points by davidjnelson on Oct 8, 2017 | hide | past | favorite | 186 comments |
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| It seems silly to write the same types of code over and over to build CRUD web user interfaces. There have of course been hundreds of UI builders. Why aren't they used? Styling should just use plain CSS. Behavior should be mostly auto generated config from a standardized format such as json schema or a db schema. Behavior customizability should come from tweaking the auto generated json config, and adding some HTML and JavaScript to higher order components. The build targets should use plugins, starting with angular and react. Components should use a shared plugin infrastructure. Designers should be able to prototype in an invision like tool with real CSS and HTML that can be checked into source control. Why isn't this the way things are done? |
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There are lots of those. Rails is the obvious one to point to, but there are dozens of others built in the late 00's that all tried to recreate that "20 minute DB-Backed Blog" demo.
I imagine the answer (to my question, and thus yours) is that fashion changed. Everybody wants to build Single Page Apps today. For everything. Even when it makes no sense whatsoever to do so.
So you find yourself dragging in a few megabytes of javascript just to render your static blog page. And you have all the power that made sense for the engineers at Facebook to use on their newsfeed, where things would regularly change behind the scenes and the page needed to re-render and re-flow itself several times a minute without the user noticing, for which a brief 3 second "flash of empty container" was a reasonable trade-off. And you use none of that power on your page, but you have it there in reserve, just in case. Because that's what The Trend has told you to do.
Step back and build some pieces of your site with tools that can look at your database and spit out some sensible defaults for CRUD screens, shamefully pre-rendered on the server as they may be, for the pieces where it makes sense to do so.