7 ms·

Front end development is crazy these days. I remember on my road to learning Java EE banging my head on the wall trying to put together things like dependency m

by Yhippa 10y ago

Front end development is crazy these days. I remember on my road to learning Java EE banging my head on the wall trying to put together things like dependency management with Maven, ORM's, and all sorts of arcane concepts and patterns. It took me a long time to get to that point but now it seems all too familiar. As someone coming up to speed with frameworks like React and Angular 2 it feels like that all over again.

crypto5 10y ago
I think in angular everything is already tied together, and you just write code.
jacobsenscott 10y ago
That's Conway's law for you. All three frameworks were built by meglogcorp, and they all feel exactly the same. It is funny that after the Rails driven success web devs had moving away from J2EE they are falling right back into the same traps - ultra complex bloated frameworks built on a terrible language.
- arahaya 10y ago
  Symfony comes to mind. It's like a php clone of Spring.
- indexerror 10y ago
  > ultra complex bloated frameworks built on a terrible language Even if you consider JS a bad language, proper abstractions can change the face of it entirely. By your logic, assembly is also bad since it is absurd to write anything useful in it. IMO Elm is a step in the right direction.
  - axihack 10y ago
    I've been doing a lot of FE for many years now and have worked with all major frameworks and I love JS and its flexibility. That being said I think we've been building one framework after another trying to abstract the things that make JS a language not suitable for state dependent apps. Elm feels like the right step compared to anything else out there.
- choward 10y ago
  Javascript is definitely a terrible language, but it is the only language for the web unless you consider languages that transpile to javascript. Are you suggesting not using a javascript framework, using a transpiled language instead of javascript, not writing any front end code at all, or doing something ridiculous like turbolinks?
  - bezzi 10y ago
    What is wrong with turbo links???
  - calsy 10y ago
    Why would you consider JS to be a terrible language? It's not a requirement to use a framework to code in JS.
    - jomamaxx 10y ago
      "Why would you consider JS to be a terrible language? " JS is kind of a 'bad language' because: 1) It's missing some pretty important things. Try to determine if a value is a number. Seriously. Look into that mess. Or anything else. Doing simple type-checking is crazy, and we basically are resigned to 'best practices' - which is crazy. 2) Prototype chaining is a neat idea and has some merits - but in reality it makes things super-duper complicated. Ask 10 JS devs how it works and get 21 answers. That is bad. 3) Almost nothing is built in. You need to use a lot of 3rd party libs to do common things. 4) There is no such thing as 'JS' - ever browser, every version - you get completely different implementations. Maybe we can't blame 'JS' - but pragmatically, this means JS is a problem. A minor issue is issues with packaging, encapsulation and scale, which is also a function of loose typing. When JS programs get complex, they get unruly, and you wish you might be able to do things in an OO language at that point. JS is really light, and that has advantages - and I think it's the best language for a lot of async things - and UI's are inherently async - so that's good. In 5-8 years JS might be 'stabilized' in terms of libs or de-facto standards and it will grow. To anyone who's programmed in other, more established languages, I think it's clear JS has some weirdness that doesn't need to be there. But I like it.
freyr 10y ago
That's funny; as someone familiar with React, Angular, etc., the Java ecosystem seems utterly impenetrable.
- dfsegoat 10y ago
  Yeah - we consult with an angular + Java group (for angular only) --- I can't understand half of what they are talking about when they talk about Enterprise level Java web projects. Java for Hadoop, Spark etc I work with daily.
  - eitally 10y ago
    Enterprise projects tend to have way more convoluted business logic and interfaces than consumer stuff -- it doesn't get nearly the love it deserves imho. Those developers, DBAs, devops folks, and sysadmins suffer sooooo much every day.
    - waltero 10y ago
      absolutely - but typically you can't get all this pain across to the 'business' because of an enormous lack of understanding. As long as the buttons in the GUI look nice and shiny, who cares what happens further under the hood..
    - j_jochem 10y ago
      Java EE is basically an excuse for consultants to overcharge for overengineering solutions to problems that were already complex to begin with. Source: Did some Java EE consulting here and there.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
eternalban 10y ago
I venture a guess that you learned JEE by rote and not from first principles. Learning by rote is stressful since your mind has to retain effectively a bag of (to it incomprehensible) technical trivia. In contrast, first principles are compact and generative, and such a grasp also informs your intuition so you can actually make educated guesses and jump in the deep end when picking up a new stack. Same principles apply to learning programming languages. The biggest headache in picking new stacks today is the current trend of technical neologisms, so a bit of initial squinting (for recognition) is required.
szines 10y ago
If you use Ember.js, which is the most matured and serious on the market, you never had that feeling that JS changes a lot. Consistent and continuous improvement. The best choice.
dlandis 10y ago
That's very true -- it is reminiscent of the old J2EE days 12+ years ago. But it didn't really take long back then for a consensus to emerge about how awful most of that technology was (enterprise java beans, etc) and for people to settle on more simplified, streamlined approaches. How long will it take for the momentum in the front end community to similarly shift away from these bloatware approaches?
- iamcreasy 10y ago
  I am a java programmer and I want to head towards web development. My first thought was learning JSP, Servlet and then move towards different frameworks like Spring. I don't know much - but can you tell me why JavaEE is an awful technology?

by Yhippa 10y ago

crypto5 10y ago

I think in angular everything is already tied together, and you just write code.

jacobsenscott 10y ago

That's Conway's law for you. All three frameworks were built by meglogcorp, and they all feel exactly the same. It is funny that after the Rails driven success web devs had moving away from J2EE they are falling right back into the same traps - ultra complex bloated frameworks built on a terrible language.

arahaya 10y ago
Symfony comes to mind. It's like a php clone of Spring.
indexerror 10y ago
> ultra complex bloated frameworks built on a terrible language Even if you consider JS a bad language, proper abstractions can change the face of it entirely. By your logic, assembly is also bad since it is absurd to write anything useful in it. IMO Elm is a step in the right direction.
- axihack 10y ago
  I've been doing a lot of FE for many years now and have worked with all major frameworks and I love JS and its flexibility. That being said I think we've been building one framework after another trying to abstract the things that make JS a language not suitable for state dependent apps. Elm feels like the right step compared to anything else out there.
choward 10y ago
Javascript is definitely a terrible language, but it is the only language for the web unless you consider languages that transpile to javascript. Are you suggesting not using a javascript framework, using a transpiled language instead of javascript, not writing any front end code at all, or doing something ridiculous like turbolinks?
- bezzi 10y ago
  What is wrong with turbo links???
- calsy 10y ago
  Why would you consider JS to be a terrible language? It's not a requirement to use a framework to code in JS.
  - jomamaxx 10y ago
    "Why would you consider JS to be a terrible language? " JS is kind of a 'bad language' because: 1) It's missing some pretty important things. Try to determine if a value is a number. Seriously. Look into that mess. Or anything else. Doing simple type-checking is crazy, and we basically are resigned to 'best practices' - which is crazy. 2) Prototype chaining is a neat idea and has some merits - but in reality it makes things super-duper complicated. Ask 10 JS devs how it works and get 21 answers. That is bad. 3) Almost nothing is built in. You need to use a lot of 3rd party libs to do common things. 4) There is no such thing as 'JS' - ever browser, every version - you get completely different implementations. Maybe we can't blame 'JS' - but pragmatically, this means JS is a problem. A minor issue is issues with packaging, encapsulation and scale, which is also a function of loose typing. When JS programs get complex, they get unruly, and you wish you might be able to do things in an OO language at that point. JS is really light, and that has advantages - and I think it's the best language for a lot of async things - and UI's are inherently async - so that's good. In 5-8 years JS might be 'stabilized' in terms of libs or de-facto standards and it will grow. To anyone who's programmed in other, more established languages, I think it's clear JS has some weirdness that doesn't need to be there. But I like it.

freyr 10y ago

That's funny; as someone familiar with React, Angular, etc., the Java ecosystem seems utterly impenetrable.

dfsegoat 10y ago
Yeah - we consult with an angular + Java group (for angular only) --- I can't understand half of what they are talking about when they talk about Enterprise level Java web projects. Java for Hadoop, Spark etc I work with daily.
- eitally 10y ago
  Enterprise projects tend to have way more convoluted business logic and interfaces than consumer stuff -- it doesn't get nearly the love it deserves imho. Those developers, DBAs, devops folks, and sysadmins suffer sooooo much every day.
  - waltero 10y ago
    absolutely - but typically you can't get all this pain across to the 'business' because of an enormous lack of understanding. As long as the buttons in the GUI look nice and shiny, who cares what happens further under the hood..
  - j_jochem 10y ago
    Java EE is basically an excuse for consultants to overcharge for overengineering solutions to problems that were already complex to begin with. Source: Did some Java EE consulting here and there.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]

eternalban 10y ago

I venture a guess that you learned JEE by rote and not from first principles. Learning by rote is stressful since your mind has to retain effectively a bag of (to it incomprehensible) technical trivia. In contrast, first principles are compact and generative, and such a grasp also informs your intuition so you can actually make educated guesses and jump in the deep end when picking up a new stack. Same principles apply to learning programming languages. The biggest headache in picking new stacks today is the current trend of technical neologisms, so a bit of initial squinting (for recognition) is required.

szines 10y ago

If you use Ember.js, which is the most matured and serious on the market, you never had that feeling that JS changes a lot. Consistent and continuous improvement. The best choice.

dlandis 10y ago

That's very true -- it is reminiscent of the old J2EE days 12+ years ago. But it didn't really take long back then for a consensus to emerge about how awful most of that technology was (enterprise java beans, etc) and for people to settle on more simplified, streamlined approaches. How long will it take for the momentum in the front end community to similarly shift away from these bloatware approaches?

iamcreasy 10y ago
I am a java programmer and I want to head towards web development. My first thought was learning JSP, Servlet and then move towards different frameworks like Spring. I don't know much - but can you tell me why JavaEE is an awful technology?