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> I'm asking because in all the projects I've been involved with, consuming the backend API always felt like a mess with lots of reinventing the wheel (poorly)

by Merad 6y ago

> I'm asking because in all the projects I've been involved with, consuming the backend API always felt like a mess with lots of reinventing the wheel (poorly) and duplication of code. I can't believe in 2020 there's not some kind of library I can call that will give me my backend resources as JSON and transparently handle all the caching, pagination, error handling (translate error responses to exceptions), etc and people have to do all this by hand when calling something like Axios. If you look at 20 REST API's you'll probably see 30 different patterns for pagination, search/sort, error responses, etc. There have been a couple attempts to standardize REST such as OData but I think it's safe to say that they haven't been very successful. It's kind of challenging to build standard reusable front end tools when everyone builds back ends differently.

Nextgrid 6y ago
Ember has somewhat solved that problem though. You have the concept of data adapters which would be clients for your API (you can make a custom one if extending the existing ones isn't an option) and the rest of the application just interacts with the equivalent of database models without ever having to worry about fetching the data. You could swap the data adapter without having to change the rest of the code. We seem to have lost this with the move to React though, and even the hodgepodge of libraries doesn't provide a comparable replacement.
jamil7 6y ago
Haven’t used it but aren’t there things that can connect to a swagger API spec and do some of the heavy lifting for you? I agree that the network layer in frontend is tedious to implement, things like GraphQL and Apollo attempt raise the abstraction level. What I would really like to see is something even more abstracted, e.g a wrapper around indexdb you can write to that syncs periodically over websockets to your server, more similar to the patterns we use on mobile.
- richeyryan 6y ago
  It seems that you are describing pouchdb: https://pouchdb.com/ https://pouchdb.com/
  - jamil7 6y ago
    You're right Pouch completely slipped my mind, it's a great solution. But what about something more generic on the backend that wasn't database specfic, some sync engine you could put in front of whatever database you wanted. Can you do something like this with Pouch?

by Merad 6y ago

Nextgrid 6y ago

Ember has somewhat solved that problem though. You have the concept of data adapters which would be clients for your API (you can make a custom one if extending the existing ones isn't an option) and the rest of the application just interacts with the equivalent of database models without ever having to worry about fetching the data. You could swap the data adapter without having to change the rest of the code. We seem to have lost this with the move to React though, and even the hodgepodge of libraries doesn't provide a comparable replacement.

jamil7 6y ago

Haven’t used it but aren’t there things that can connect to a swagger API spec and do some of the heavy lifting for you? I agree that the network layer in frontend is tedious to implement, things like GraphQL and Apollo attempt raise the abstraction level. What I would really like to see is something even more abstracted, e.g a wrapper around indexdb you can write to that syncs periodically over websockets to your server, more similar to the patterns we use on mobile.

richeyryan 6y ago
It seems that you are describing pouchdb: https://pouchdb.com/ https://pouchdb.com/
- jamil7 6y ago
  You're right Pouch completely slipped my mind, it's a great solution. But what about something more generic on the backend that wasn't database specfic, some sync engine you could put in front of whatever database you wanted. Can you do something like this with Pouch?