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The devil is sometimes in the large as well. Form changes — code that used to run while generating a web page now runs in a REST service. Code that used to ru

by dkarl 6y ago

The devil is sometimes in the large as well. Form changes — code that used to run while generating a web page now runs in a REST service. Code that used to run in a REST service now runs as a FAAS. Code that used to run in a FAAS now runs in a stream processor. Your framework could tie you to a specific form, forcing you to implement your FAAS by posting each request to a REST service, or forcing you to implement your stream processor by posting each event to a FAAS. Or you can liberate your code from form by making sure that nothing important about it depends on a form-specific framework.

Townley 6y ago
True, but all code ages out, and I wouldn’t expect the average LAMP stack site to have adjusted to the REST-powered react world any better than a rails app would. When use cases change, huge parts of a code base should be rewritten (otherwise it was duplicated work to begin with) That said: good, modular, well-developed frameworks evolve alongside their use cases. Django with DjangoRestFramework is an excellent choice for many API use cases, and the migration path is about as painless a major architectural overhaul can be.
- dkarl 6y ago
  It shouldn't need to be rewritten. The same Python code can be utilized in all of those different forms, unless you've tied yourself to a framework for functionality that needs to be used in the new context, i.e., for functionality that is not form-specific. If you've fallen into the trap of thinking a specific form is eternal -- for example, if you've subconsciously identified "our back end == our REST services" and therefore "data serialization/deserialization, metrics, and data storage access should and will be done only in the REST services" then you might have relied on a REST service framework for that functionality. Then when you want to move functionality to an AWS Lambda or a Spark streaming job, you find yourself forced to choose between running a REST framework inside the Lambda or Spark streaming job (which will be hacky, if it works at all, since frameworks want to own the application lifecycle and be configured via specific mechanisms) or writing and maintaining a duplicate implementation of all your data serialization/deserialization code, metrics configs, S3 configs, etc. I don't mean to say it's a disaster if you end up doing that, but it's a cost that will tend to hold you back from doing the right thing and make you persist with hacks and band-aids longer than you would have if you were free to change. > good, modular, well-developed frameworks evolve alongside their use cases. Django with DjangoRestFramework is an excellent choice for many API use cases That's a very modest change. It's still a long-lived service doing request/response over HTTP.

by dkarl 6y ago

Townley 6y ago

True, but all code ages out, and I wouldn’t expect the average LAMP stack site to have adjusted to the REST-powered react world any better than a rails app would. When use cases change, huge parts of a code base should be rewritten (otherwise it was duplicated work to begin with) That said: good, modular, well-developed frameworks evolve alongside their use cases. Django with DjangoRestFramework is an excellent choice for many API use cases, and the migration path is about as painless a major architectural overhaul can be.

dkarl 6y ago
It shouldn't need to be rewritten. The same Python code can be utilized in all of those different forms, unless you've tied yourself to a framework for functionality that needs to be used in the new context, i.e., for functionality that is not form-specific. If you've fallen into the trap of thinking a specific form is eternal -- for example, if you've subconsciously identified "our back end == our REST services" and therefore "data serialization/deserialization, metrics, and data storage access should and will be done only in the REST services" then you might have relied on a REST service framework for that functionality. Then when you want to move functionality to an AWS Lambda or a Spark streaming job, you find yourself forced to choose between running a REST framework inside the Lambda or Spark streaming job (which will be hacky, if it works at all, since frameworks want to own the application lifecycle and be configured via specific mechanisms) or writing and maintaining a duplicate implementation of all your data serialization/deserialization code, metrics configs, S3 configs, etc. I don't mean to say it's a disaster if you end up doing that, but it's a cost that will tend to hold you back from doing the right thing and make you persist with hacks and band-aids longer than you would have if you were free to change. > good, modular, well-developed frameworks evolve alongside their use cases. Django with DjangoRestFramework is an excellent choice for many API use cases That's a very modest change. It's still a long-lived service doing request/response over HTTP.