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From my experience as a developer, they rewrite frontends in React because it's cool or because their boss said them to do so. Nobody asks if React is really ne

From my experience as a developer, they rewrite frontends in React because it's cool or because their boss said them to do so. Nobody asks if React is really needed in this project and what would be the best solution. For example, my bank now has an online banking written in React. It's more buggy than the previous version (e.g., the back button does not work; the payment UI is quite chaotic), but they can boast that they use a modern technology. I doubt that a single page application provides any benefit for this task. Their competitor still uses HTML forms and they work perfectly. This also reminds me of VB6 era. Back then, many programs were distributed with the runtime and/or an installer that was larger than the actual executable. The history repeats now with the bloated web frameworks.

solardev 4y ago
That sucks. I'm sorry you had that experience =/ For the last few projects I worked on, we first built super basic prototypes in different frameworks (React, Next, Vue, Svelte, Drupal, Wordpress, jQuery, Symfony, Angular back in the day, etc.) before choosing one to settle on, trying to balance concerns like DX, hireability, UX, hosting & infra costs, whatever. If I were instead just forced to use a certain framework without doing due diligence, I'd be pretty annoyed too. Undoubtedly there are people chasing the "new fancy", but also, by now React is considered pretty old and mature and (probably) kinda lame to anyone really wanting the newest edgy framework. To your point, though, the SPA routing system (and how it interacts with browser history and URLs) is a pain indeed. React Router, in particular, handles it pretty terribly, IMO (it's much better in a system like Next).
- posterboy 4y ago
  This is still besides the point entirely. Somebody looking to learn web programming is not going to start running a bank. html is on the representation layer, not a programming language. Modern web apps go much deeper and are using js as as a programming language for web programming that can go much deeper. As an extreme example, Quake Live implements an entire transfer protocol over TCP/IP. In the standard OSI model, there are a few layers between this and that. But there is a reason that purely representative documents still prefer PDF.

solardev 4y ago

That sucks. I'm sorry you had that experience =/ For the last few projects I worked on, we first built super basic prototypes in different frameworks (React, Next, Vue, Svelte, Drupal, Wordpress, jQuery, Symfony, Angular back in the day, etc.) before choosing one to settle on, trying to balance concerns like DX, hireability, UX, hosting & infra costs, whatever. If I were instead just forced to use a certain framework without doing due diligence, I'd be pretty annoyed too. Undoubtedly there are people chasing the "new fancy", but also, by now React is considered pretty old and mature and (probably) kinda lame to anyone really wanting the newest edgy framework. To your point, though, the SPA routing system (and how it interacts with browser history and URLs) is a pain indeed. React Router, in particular, handles it pretty terribly, IMO (it's much better in a system like Next).

posterboy 4y ago
This is still besides the point entirely. Somebody looking to learn web programming is not going to start running a bank. html is on the representation layer, not a programming language. Modern web apps go much deeper and are using js as as a programming language for web programming that can go much deeper. As an extreme example, Quake Live implements an entire transfer protocol over TCP/IP. In the standard OSI model, there are a few layers between this and that. But there is a reason that purely representative documents still prefer PDF.