<story><title>Second-guessing the modern web (2020)</title><url>https://macwright.com/2020/05/10/spa-fatigue.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nemothekid</author><text>One thing I&amp;#x27;ve seen happen again and again in a lot of technologies is a &amp;quot;framework gravity&amp;quot;. A lot of people see this as engineers just wanting to work on &amp;quot;hype&amp;quot; technology but I think what is actually happening is a reflection of global engineering time.&lt;p&gt;React is great for SPAs. Most large companies are working on honest-to-god SPAs. By extension most &lt;i&gt;engineers&lt;/i&gt; are working on SPAs. So most tooling is created for SPAs. Now if you aren&amp;#x27;t building an SPA you look around and find almost every resource is around building an SPA. Even if you know you don&amp;#x27;t need an SPA, it&amp;#x27;s easier to hire, iterate, and even use other open source solutions if you are building an SPA, so you try to hamfist your project into an SPA.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s a bit like having a bike commute in America. A bike might be the best thing for you to do - cheaper than a car, keeps you healthy and you don&amp;#x27;t need a garage. But you quickly find that everything is built for cars and it&amp;#x27;s easier to deal with the disadvantages of a car than try to commute with a bike.&lt;p&gt;I remember thinking the same thing about Hadoop 5-6 years ago. If you had &amp;quot;small data&amp;quot; you could get what you wanted with SQL and fast disks. But &lt;i&gt;everything&lt;/i&gt; else assumed you were on Hadoop. Newgrads were trained in hadoop. New tools were Hadoop first. New research was all hadoop. If you hit a small issue with your DB, almost every solution would be &amp;quot;this is how it&amp;#x27;s solved in Hadoop&amp;quot;. It was hard to even know if what you were trying to do what even possible without Hadoop.&lt;p&gt;The only optimism I have is that maybe in 5 years we will all collectively wake up and stop trying to shove React everywhere just like we stopped with Hadoop.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>BiteCode_dev</author><text>&amp;gt;  Most large companies are working on honest-to-god SPAs.&lt;p&gt;Most devs don&amp;#x27;t work at large companies, at least not tech oriented large companies. I&amp;#x27;m almost certain most projects don&amp;#x27;t come out from such companies either, statistically.&lt;p&gt;In fact, most projects are not SPA, nor using any kind of AI, Big Data, or another buzzword.&lt;p&gt;So I don&amp;#x27;t think that&amp;#x27;s it.&lt;p&gt;I think that large companies are just the loudest, also creating&amp;#x2F;promoting popular FOSS projects, and they have great engineers that are on many social networkd, including HN, or write famous blogs.&lt;p&gt;And so people have the impression that you need an SPA into a docker mix among other microservices each horizontally scaled in the cloud, monitored using an observability framework, using a big data pipeline for processing things they will store in their NoSQL sharded DB accessible through a GraphQL Api.&lt;p&gt;Because Jack working at GAFAM for $500k has the time, env and will to sing about it, but Juan working in a Madrid bank is just spending his company time fixing the Tomcat server quietly.</text></comment>
<story><title>Second-guessing the modern web (2020)</title><url>https://macwright.com/2020/05/10/spa-fatigue.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nemothekid</author><text>One thing I&amp;#x27;ve seen happen again and again in a lot of technologies is a &amp;quot;framework gravity&amp;quot;. A lot of people see this as engineers just wanting to work on &amp;quot;hype&amp;quot; technology but I think what is actually happening is a reflection of global engineering time.&lt;p&gt;React is great for SPAs. Most large companies are working on honest-to-god SPAs. By extension most &lt;i&gt;engineers&lt;/i&gt; are working on SPAs. So most tooling is created for SPAs. Now if you aren&amp;#x27;t building an SPA you look around and find almost every resource is around building an SPA. Even if you know you don&amp;#x27;t need an SPA, it&amp;#x27;s easier to hire, iterate, and even use other open source solutions if you are building an SPA, so you try to hamfist your project into an SPA.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s a bit like having a bike commute in America. A bike might be the best thing for you to do - cheaper than a car, keeps you healthy and you don&amp;#x27;t need a garage. But you quickly find that everything is built for cars and it&amp;#x27;s easier to deal with the disadvantages of a car than try to commute with a bike.&lt;p&gt;I remember thinking the same thing about Hadoop 5-6 years ago. If you had &amp;quot;small data&amp;quot; you could get what you wanted with SQL and fast disks. But &lt;i&gt;everything&lt;/i&gt; else assumed you were on Hadoop. Newgrads were trained in hadoop. New tools were Hadoop first. New research was all hadoop. If you hit a small issue with your DB, almost every solution would be &amp;quot;this is how it&amp;#x27;s solved in Hadoop&amp;quot;. It was hard to even know if what you were trying to do what even possible without Hadoop.&lt;p&gt;The only optimism I have is that maybe in 5 years we will all collectively wake up and stop trying to shove React everywhere just like we stopped with Hadoop.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>arsome</author><text>Yep. We recently did an assessment of available UI libraries and pretty much concluded the best maintained libraries with a modern look and feel are all web-focused and we&amp;#x27;re likely to have to settle for building an electron app if we want to be able to take advantage of the best selection of 3rd party libraries without building as much ourselves. As much as I don&amp;#x27;t like the ecosystem or Javascript as a language, there&amp;#x27;s so much tooling around it and the libraries available seem to be miles ahead of other options. I&amp;#x27;m hoping Redux and TypeScript can make it moderately bearable. Fingers crossed.&lt;p&gt;Seriously, what is there? Microsoft doesn&amp;#x27;t even have a clear direction for desktop apps - their most recent stuff like VS Code and Teams are built on Electron.</text></comment>