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Can someone explain why the author refers to the nodejs layer as "front-end?" It is a UI-layer, but is it not still back-end?
by JacksonGariety 13y ago
Can someone explain why the author refers to the nodejs layer as "front-end?"
It is a UI-layer, but is it not still back-end?
- dak1 13y agoI think it makes more sense if you think of it as "domain of the front-end engineer". There's certainly an increasing number of developers who are focusing more on the front-end plus Node.js, often for connecting backend services and providing a RESTful API.
- sisk 13y agoI think it may be more appropriately called the mid-tier. You have your back-end handling storage, low level validations, complex business logic, service integration and coordination, background jobs, etc. You have your mid-tier with the implementation-specific validations / logic, template rendering, etc. And then you have your front-end with (as appropriate) all the client-side stuff (validations, logic, and rendering). It's worth considering the source, in this case. Nicholas has spent a lot of time both employed full-time and as a contractor at organizations that operate at a massive scale. This solution works if your application, architecture, or even engineers would benefit from additional abstraction. I do take issue with one point he brings up, however. He mentions the mid-tier communicating with the back-end over HTTP(S). Unless you have some need to serve your API exclusively over HTTP(S), why not use something with a little less overhead (like a message queue)?