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I've been doing web dev for 6 years, full stack, back and front, mostly somewhere in the middle and front end. From what I've seen, backend rendering ain't goi

I've been doing web dev for 6 years, full stack, back and front, mostly somewhere in the middle and front end. From what I've seen, backend rendering ain't going no where. This SPA trends is still wild west. Angular 1 is kind slowing down imo cause of the drastic changes in Angular 2. Ember is bloat. The javascript eco system is meh right now. NodeJS people probably will argue against this. But seriously, javascript needs a module system. RequireJS kinda suck with grunt, it doesn't work so well other grunt modules. Most of the frontend people I've met barely even use Bower. Sure maybe one that it'll be the future but right now it's unclear whose the winner and if people are willing to invest in something that can be obsolete in 1 or 2 years. Seeing how angular 2 is going to come out eventually a year or two, why learn angular 1? Oh there's the react library and other stuff going on too. I haven't use that but it's getting traction... Grunt and Glup are duking it out. In general it's just meh. I wouldn't bet on Angular or Ember anymore. Rails and Django or whatnot at least they're stable enough and have tons of people using it. I'm kinda sick of it and moving toward backend really. It'll be fun architecturing stuff mesos, dockers, etc..

tinco 12y ago
Not to one-up you, just since apparently it's worth mentioning, I've been doing webdev for about 9 years, and at least from my perspective backend rendering is definitely going out the window. I started as a Rails dev in 2008, did ASP.Net before that, and last year I've moved from Rails to a pimped up Grape, which is a framework suited more for developing API's. Maybe it's just the sort of apps I'm building (basically SaaS) but I don't see any backend rendering in my feature, if I'm building it, it's going to be either a SPA, or a static site. (I built my sisters' band a single page static site, very nice). Latest project is using Polymer, and no Javascript framework at all. I think you're right, Angular is extremely ugly, and Ember seems to do too much. But plain Javascript has become very powerful and HTML5+CSS3 reduce the need for UI toolkits. Maybe I'm crazy, but I don't see a super hard need for modules either, I define all dependencies at a single location, and just bind everything to window. The not binding things to window rule is only for library/component developers, if you're an app developer you should own window, make it your home and have everything as you expect it to be. Anyway, what I'm hoping is that new Rails editions focus more on the SPA experience, they have been reluctant to. I use Grape, but I immediately pimped it out with all the niceties Rails has, including ActiveSupport and ActiveRecord, but also a console and decent logging. What I do worry about is the amount of people embracing Node.JS over Ruby. It's crazy people would chose Javascript over any language at all in an environment they're not absolutely forced to. My fear is one day I'll be seeking a job, and all there is is shops building webapps in vanilla Javascript, wouldn't that just be a plain horror story?
- mattmanser 12y ago
  Bind everything to window is the same as "put everything in global". It simply is not a long term viable strategy, we've been there, we've done that, it does not work. Perhaps that's not what you mean. Also plain javascript doesn't have observables in most browsers, and any SPA without an observable system can only reach a certain level of complexity. TBH, what you write is still so far from reality, that plain javascript is enough, that I am a little hesitant to take your comment seriously.
  - tinco 12y ago
    To be fair, I live a bit in the future. I build apps for tech people who are running up to date browsers, and that don't face the consuming billions. On top of that, Polymer polyfills webcomponents and two-way databinding of templates. Perhaps my apps haven't gotten big enough to see this binding in global thing fail, but I'm not sure how it would ever. You properly namespace everything right?
- scoot 12y ago
  Is this stack something you'd consider documenting? Coming from Rails, but increasingly moving towards SPAs with Rails as the API (hard to give up all the OOTB niceties), this sounds intriguing.
  - tinco 12y ago
    I definitely am going to do that as soon as we're going to start marketing the app. But at the moment the way we built it is not very repeatable, I'd love to see a project that builds out grape to be more like a standalone framework like rails is, maybe if we get time we could do that.
    - cpursley 12y ago
      > I'd love to see a project that builds out grape to be more like a standalone framework like rails is You should check out Napa by Bellycard. It takes Grape and brings it together with things we all love from Rails like ActiveRecord, Rake and generators that make for a productive framework. https://github.com/bellycard/napa https://github.com/bellycard/napa
uptown 12y ago
Take a look at PJAX. I've found it to be a nice model for rendering pages with a good balance of severe rendering speed and page updating flexibility.

tinco 12y ago

Not to one-up you, just since apparently it's worth mentioning, I've been doing webdev for about 9 years, and at least from my perspective backend rendering is definitely going out the window. I started as a Rails dev in 2008, did ASP.Net before that, and last year I've moved from Rails to a pimped up Grape, which is a framework suited more for developing API's. Maybe it's just the sort of apps I'm building (basically SaaS) but I don't see any backend rendering in my feature, if I'm building it, it's going to be either a SPA, or a static site. (I built my sisters' band a single page static site, very nice). Latest project is using Polymer, and no Javascript framework at all. I think you're right, Angular is extremely ugly, and Ember seems to do too much. But plain Javascript has become very powerful and HTML5+CSS3 reduce the need for UI toolkits. Maybe I'm crazy, but I don't see a super hard need for modules either, I define all dependencies at a single location, and just bind everything to window. The not binding things to window rule is only for library/component developers, if you're an app developer you should own window, make it your home and have everything as you expect it to be. Anyway, what I'm hoping is that new Rails editions focus more on the SPA experience, they have been reluctant to. I use Grape, but I immediately pimped it out with all the niceties Rails has, including ActiveSupport and ActiveRecord, but also a console and decent logging. What I do worry about is the amount of people embracing Node.JS over Ruby. It's crazy people would chose Javascript over any language at all in an environment they're not absolutely forced to. My fear is one day I'll be seeking a job, and all there is is shops building webapps in vanilla Javascript, wouldn't that just be a plain horror story?

mattmanser 12y ago
Bind everything to window is the same as "put everything in global". It simply is not a long term viable strategy, we've been there, we've done that, it does not work. Perhaps that's not what you mean. Also plain javascript doesn't have observables in most browsers, and any SPA without an observable system can only reach a certain level of complexity. TBH, what you write is still so far from reality, that plain javascript is enough, that I am a little hesitant to take your comment seriously.
- tinco 12y ago
  To be fair, I live a bit in the future. I build apps for tech people who are running up to date browsers, and that don't face the consuming billions. On top of that, Polymer polyfills webcomponents and two-way databinding of templates. Perhaps my apps haven't gotten big enough to see this binding in global thing fail, but I'm not sure how it would ever. You properly namespace everything right?
scoot 12y ago
Is this stack something you'd consider documenting? Coming from Rails, but increasingly moving towards SPAs with Rails as the API (hard to give up all the OOTB niceties), this sounds intriguing.
- tinco 12y ago
  I definitely am going to do that as soon as we're going to start marketing the app. But at the moment the way we built it is not very repeatable, I'd love to see a project that builds out grape to be more like a standalone framework like rails is, maybe if we get time we could do that.
  - cpursley 12y ago
    > I'd love to see a project that builds out grape to be more like a standalone framework like rails is You should check out Napa by Bellycard. It takes Grape and brings it together with things we all love from Rails like ActiveRecord, Rake and generators that make for a productive framework. https://github.com/bellycard/napa https://github.com/bellycard/napa

uptown 12y ago

Take a look at PJAX. I've found it to be a nice model for rendering pages with a good balance of severe rendering speed and page updating flexibility.