5 ms·

I have heard this rant too many times. Other comments in this thread are also just adding to the rant or trying to justify SPAs. Can someone please suggest som

I have heard this rant too many times. Other comments in this thread are also just adding to the rant or trying to justify SPAs. Can someone please suggest some alternatives.

OnlineGladiator 7y ago
> Can someone please suggest some alternatives. Don't make bloated websites. Use plain html if necessary. Hacker News seems to have a great design - do they use a complicated framework? Sure, it's harder. But it's also better. If you're not interested in performance then just keep doing whatever everybody else is already doing. Every decision is about compromises. Figure out what to prioritize (developer time, loading time, server cost, whatever) and build the best thing you can based on your goals. If you want to build something materially better than is normal, expect it to be substantially more work and money.
save_ferris 7y ago
The alternative is deciding whether or not you actually need an SPA to build your app. So many apps don’t need a react front end to be usable and accessible, and the cost of maintaining a rich front end can be quite high.
friedman23 7y ago
Don't worry about the fud these people are spreading and use the tool you know to get the job done. If that is ruby on rails using templates with plain html and css do that, if it's react do that. None of this worrying about "bloat" matters, just get it done. The two most successful chat apps in the world today are slack and discord and they use react and electron on the desktop.
- connectsnk 7y ago
  Thanks
- scarface74 7y ago
  Slack is not “successful”. Slack is a for profit business bleeding money is slow and still not seeing adoption by many major corporations. How many Slack users are on the free plan?
  - friedman23 7y ago
    An app can be successful on many metrics, profitability is not the only one. Slack is successful in that it has 10 million daus, 85000 paid users, and it managed to have the company valued at 12.4 billion dollars. Ignoring the valuation of the company I would consider any program with 10 million daus to be successful. And funny enough 10 million people choose to use slack and 14 million choose to use discord over irc every day despite the supposed "bloat" of the software. If you are a developer building an mvp and the thing you are worrying about is "bloat" I will put money on you not being successful.
    - scarface74 7y ago
      There is no definition of success for a for profit company accept profitability. Anyone can sell a bunch of dollars for 95 cents. And as far valuation, Uber and Lyft both have multi billion dollar valuations and are both losing billions a quarter.
      - friedman23 7y ago
        Regardless of your quibbling, if the creators of slack and discord decided to not use modern web frameworks to build their software they wouldn't exist.
        scarface74 7y ago
        You think Slack was ever undercapitalized to a point where they couldn’t hire both Mac and Windows developers? Companies have been producing both native Mac and Windows software for over 35 years.
cbsmith 7y ago
Actually crafting your site like you care about performance. Except the reality is that option has always been on the table. There's a meta problem here about why that option isn't the preferred one.
purerandomness 7y ago
A static site, with dynamic content where necessary, loaded via XHR requests. If you like, with helpers like Turbolinks, IntercoolerJS or some such. Actually optmizing and/or caching DB requests so your backend returns a response within 150-200ms max.

I have heard this rant too many times. Other comments in this thread are also just adding to the rant or trying to justify SPAs. Can someone please suggest some alternatives.

OnlineGladiator 7y ago

> Can someone please suggest some alternatives. Don't make bloated websites. Use plain html if necessary. Hacker News seems to have a great design - do they use a complicated framework? Sure, it's harder. But it's also better. If you're not interested in performance then just keep doing whatever everybody else is already doing. Every decision is about compromises. Figure out what to prioritize (developer time, loading time, server cost, whatever) and build the best thing you can based on your goals. If you want to build something materially better than is normal, expect it to be substantially more work and money.

save_ferris 7y ago

The alternative is deciding whether or not you actually need an SPA to build your app. So many apps don’t need a react front end to be usable and accessible, and the cost of maintaining a rich front end can be quite high.

friedman23 7y ago

Don't worry about the fud these people are spreading and use the tool you know to get the job done. If that is ruby on rails using templates with plain html and css do that, if it's react do that. None of this worrying about "bloat" matters, just get it done. The two most successful chat apps in the world today are slack and discord and they use react and electron on the desktop.

connectsnk 7y ago
Thanks
scarface74 7y ago
Slack is not “successful”. Slack is a for profit business bleeding money is slow and still not seeing adoption by many major corporations. How many Slack users are on the free plan?
- friedman23 7y ago
  An app can be successful on many metrics, profitability is not the only one. Slack is successful in that it has 10 million daus, 85000 paid users, and it managed to have the company valued at 12.4 billion dollars. Ignoring the valuation of the company I would consider any program with 10 million daus to be successful. And funny enough 10 million people choose to use slack and 14 million choose to use discord over irc every day despite the supposed "bloat" of the software. If you are a developer building an mvp and the thing you are worrying about is "bloat" I will put money on you not being successful.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    There is no definition of success for a for profit company accept profitability. Anyone can sell a bunch of dollars for 95 cents. And as far valuation, Uber and Lyft both have multi billion dollar valuations and are both losing billions a quarter.
    - friedman23 7y ago
      Regardless of your quibbling, if the creators of slack and discord decided to not use modern web frameworks to build their software they wouldn't exist.
      - scarface74 7y ago
        You think Slack was ever undercapitalized to a point where they couldn’t hire both Mac and Windows developers? Companies have been producing both native Mac and Windows software for over 35 years.

cbsmith 7y ago

Actually crafting your site like you care about performance. Except the reality is that option has always been on the table. There's a meta problem here about why that option isn't the preferred one.

purerandomness 7y ago

A static site, with dynamic content where necessary, loaded via XHR requests. If you like, with helpers like Turbolinks, IntercoolerJS or some such. Actually optmizing and/or caching DB requests so your backend returns a response within 150-200ms max.