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I wonder what the % of people in HN would be unemployed if more businesses relied on small, static or server rendered web apps instead of huge SPAs.

rads 10y ago
That's a false dichotomy. Business apps become huge codebases due to lack of engineering discipline and cutting corners to make deadlines. It happens regardless of whether the code is written for the browser or the server because there is no environment that will substitute for the skill that is necessary to control complexity in businesses which are inherently unpredictable.
sanderjd 10y ago
I strongly believe that the big line of business app I worked on for a number of years would have employed fewer people if we had designed it as an SPA backed by APIs instead of a traditional Rails app. Path dependency is real, and by the time we realized that people wanted a lot more web application behavior than we originally thought, it was time consuming to make it happen. To be sure, lots of projects have the opposite problem, but SPAs aren't some make-work conspiracy, they have real use.
- zapt02 10y ago
  Isn't increased complexity as codebase grows a basic rule of all computer programs? And don't say microservices are exempt - you'll have the same complexity on the tooling side.
  - sanderjd 10y ago
    Yes, but my conclusion in this case is that the way we started building the application - traditional full-page-load Rails with custom javascript - resulted in more complexity than if we had started with a "single page app" using a framework like Backbone (which, in fairness, was very new at the time). I didn't actually say anything about microservices. I think that may have also been a win, but it is much less clear-cut. Backing the front-end with a single monolithic API server would have been an improvement over the hybrid page generation / API approach we ended up with. These are all just my own personal conclusions, and others who also worked on the project may not agree with me, but I'm just not convinced by the backlash against js-heavy web apps, because I believe I've felt the pain of going the opposite route in the wrong case.
realityking 10y ago
In my experience the clean separation between UI and backend code that a SPA enforces is an enormous maintainability boost. Add to that, that you then have by necessity an API you can use for other systems to interact with yours (or just to build some quick one off scripts) and the advantages are even clearer.

rads 10y ago

That's a false dichotomy. Business apps become huge codebases due to lack of engineering discipline and cutting corners to make deadlines. It happens regardless of whether the code is written for the browser or the server because there is no environment that will substitute for the skill that is necessary to control complexity in businesses which are inherently unpredictable.

sanderjd 10y ago

I strongly believe that the big line of business app I worked on for a number of years would have employed fewer people if we had designed it as an SPA backed by APIs instead of a traditional Rails app. Path dependency is real, and by the time we realized that people wanted a lot more web application behavior than we originally thought, it was time consuming to make it happen. To be sure, lots of projects have the opposite problem, but SPAs aren't some make-work conspiracy, they have real use.

zapt02 10y ago
Isn't increased complexity as codebase grows a basic rule of all computer programs? And don't say microservices are exempt - you'll have the same complexity on the tooling side.
- sanderjd 10y ago
  Yes, but my conclusion in this case is that the way we started building the application - traditional full-page-load Rails with custom javascript - resulted in more complexity than if we had started with a "single page app" using a framework like Backbone (which, in fairness, was very new at the time). I didn't actually say anything about microservices. I think that may have also been a win, but it is much less clear-cut. Backing the front-end with a single monolithic API server would have been an improvement over the hybrid page generation / API approach we ended up with. These are all just my own personal conclusions, and others who also worked on the project may not agree with me, but I'm just not convinced by the backlash against js-heavy web apps, because I believe I've felt the pain of going the opposite route in the wrong case.

realityking 10y ago

In my experience the clean separation between UI and backend code that a SPA enforces is an enormous maintainability boost. Add to that, that you then have by necessity an API you can use for other systems to interact with yours (or just to build some quick one off scripts) and the advantages are even clearer.