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Facebook: MVC Does Not Scale, Use Flux Instead (2014)

32 points by betolink 11y ago

pbreit 11y ago
Article was confused and pretty much irrelevant anyway because Facebook.
rebelidealist 11y ago
I really wonder if a startup that is 2-3 years old should worry about frontend MVC not scaling.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
tomlongson 11y ago
This article is from 2014, but if you are at the scale of Facebook, maybe Flux is a better pattern.
tsunamifury 11y ago
I think a better way to put it is, sufficiently complex social software doesn't work on an MVC model that was originally developed primarily for single user interactions. I've encountered it in my work work on ultra large social projects. The complexity and number of states created from so many players leads to a mess of user journeys and exponentially more code. But in my experience this is more of a product design problem than a architecture one. Social software is funny in that two user clients can technically work fine but social bugs can still arise due to poor design. Sorting these out requires a great deal of care in the initial product design and goal setting, the later complexity problems in the code being an outgrowth of this stage.
viach 11y ago
"This was becoming a serious problem for developers new to a certain codebase because they were afraid to touch the code" Sounds like "We don't write tests and blame MVC for that"
- jamra 11y ago
  There is a good video on Flux's website that explains through an example. They make a very good point about dependencies between Models and Views. According to that video, Flux isolates concerns in a more modular way than MVC.
- tomlongson 11y ago
  Flux isn't exactly easier to understand than MVC either.
escape_goat 11y ago
This managed to get 15 points in under an hour despite being a not-extremely-interesting article from 2014 with an inconclusive 'update' that was simply a reportage of the subsequent discussion on reddit. Details on the submission: The account was created 698 days ago, but there is no record of any comment or submission until 240 days ago. Submissions are infrequent (6) until 90 days ago; since this time there have been 30 submissions. Six of those are marked [dead] or [flagged]. Most of the submissions only score two or three points. Two were very successful. Also starting 90 days ago is the account's run of three comments. All of them are root-level comments. The first, 90 days ago, is a lengthy quote with the words "Couldn't agree more" added to it. At 14 days, the most recent is a citation of a fact to a link with the putative source. The remaining comment, at 45 days, is a simple inference of a fact not mentioned in the associated article, albeit one that would impress me if an automated system had made it. My own conclusion: Probably fifteen of us clicked the arrow without reading the article because the link text contained the words 'Facebook', 'MVC', and 'Flux'. I realize having written this that it's actually a bit small-minded and mean-spirited to think like that, and I would love to hear anyone's defence as to why this article about Flux would be a good one to read over a year after publication, if in fact I am wrong about the (current) value of the article in the opinion of anyone who has read it.
- prawn 11y ago
  "Most of the submissions only score two or three points. Two were very successful." No comment on the rest, but that quote above probably describes my submission history and I do little more than submit things I think are interesting or might interest fellow HN readers. e.g., nothing out of the ordinary. I've previously submitted a link that Paul Graham tweeted, and it was quickly marked as dead/flagged, so a number of dead/flagged links might not necessarily mean much either.
- t0mbstone 11y ago
  Hacker news REALLY needs a downvote arrow if we want a way to keep things fresh and relevant.
- betolink 11y ago
  WOW!!! I got a HN submission sentiment analysis! I normally don't comment on the submissions in general but I always submit stuff when it looks interesting to me, no matter if the article, video etc was made yesterday or 50 years ago. In this case I was reading about a new JS framework called REDUX[https://github.com/rackt/redux https://github.com/rackt/redux] and started to think about trends in software development before I ran into this "updated" article. It's interesting to me how we went from from sync to async, from MVC to a flow and vice versa, now what seems funny is that it only takes a big company to throw a "new" pattern or framework to make everybody think that if THEY are doing it then we should also do it. And if people clicked just because it says "AAA company says you should use (insert current hipster framework)" kind of proves my point. So no, I'm not a robot @escape_goat but thanks for making me pass the reverse Turing test =)

32 points by betolink 11y ago

pbreit 11y ago

Article was confused and pretty much irrelevant anyway because Facebook.

rebelidealist 11y ago

I really wonder if a startup that is 2-3 years old should worry about frontend MVC not scaling.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

tomlongson 11y ago

This article is from 2014, but if you are at the scale of Facebook, maybe Flux is a better pattern.

tsunamifury 11y ago

I think a better way to put it is, sufficiently complex social software doesn't work on an MVC model that was originally developed primarily for single user interactions. I've encountered it in my work work on ultra large social projects. The complexity and number of states created from so many players leads to a mess of user journeys and exponentially more code. But in my experience this is more of a product design problem than a architecture one. Social software is funny in that two user clients can technically work fine but social bugs can still arise due to poor design. Sorting these out requires a great deal of care in the initial product design and goal setting, the later complexity problems in the code being an outgrowth of this stage.

viach 11y ago

"This was becoming a serious problem for developers new to a certain codebase because they were afraid to touch the code" Sounds like "We don't write tests and blame MVC for that"

jamra 11y ago
There is a good video on Flux's website that explains through an example. They make a very good point about dependencies between Models and Views. According to that video, Flux isolates concerns in a more modular way than MVC.
tomlongson 11y ago
Flux isn't exactly easier to understand than MVC either.

escape_goat 11y ago

This managed to get 15 points in under an hour despite being a not-extremely-interesting article from 2014 with an inconclusive 'update' that was simply a reportage of the subsequent discussion on reddit. Details on the submission: The account was created 698 days ago, but there is no record of any comment or submission until 240 days ago. Submissions are infrequent (6) until 90 days ago; since this time there have been 30 submissions. Six of those are marked [dead] or [flagged]. Most of the submissions only score two or three points. Two were very successful. Also starting 90 days ago is the account's run of three comments. All of them are root-level comments. The first, 90 days ago, is a lengthy quote with the words "Couldn't agree more" added to it. At 14 days, the most recent is a citation of a fact to a link with the putative source. The remaining comment, at 45 days, is a simple inference of a fact not mentioned in the associated article, albeit one that would impress me if an automated system had made it. My own conclusion: Probably fifteen of us clicked the arrow without reading the article because the link text contained the words 'Facebook', 'MVC', and 'Flux'. I realize having written this that it's actually a bit small-minded and mean-spirited to think like that, and I would love to hear anyone's defence as to why this article about Flux would be a good one to read over a year after publication, if in fact I am wrong about the (current) value of the article in the opinion of anyone who has read it.

prawn 11y ago
"Most of the submissions only score two or three points. Two were very successful." No comment on the rest, but that quote above probably describes my submission history and I do little more than submit things I think are interesting or might interest fellow HN readers. e.g., nothing out of the ordinary. I've previously submitted a link that Paul Graham tweeted, and it was quickly marked as dead/flagged, so a number of dead/flagged links might not necessarily mean much either.
t0mbstone 11y ago
Hacker news REALLY needs a downvote arrow if we want a way to keep things fresh and relevant.
betolink 11y ago
WOW!!! I got a HN submission sentiment analysis! I normally don't comment on the submissions in general but I always submit stuff when it looks interesting to me, no matter if the article, video etc was made yesterday or 50 years ago. In this case I was reading about a new JS framework called REDUX[https://github.com/rackt/redux https://github.com/rackt/redux] and started to think about trends in software development before I ran into this "updated" article. It's interesting to me how we went from from sync to async, from MVC to a flow and vice versa, now what seems funny is that it only takes a big company to throw a "new" pattern or framework to make everybody think that if THEY are doing it then we should also do it. And if people clicked just because it says "AAA company says you should use (insert current hipster framework)" kind of proves my point. So no, I'm not a robot @escape_goat but thanks for making me pass the reverse Turing test =)