• asyncrosaurus@programming.dev
    ·
    1 year ago

    SPAs are mostly garbage, and the internet has been irreparably damaged by lazy devs chasing trends just to building simple sites with overly complicated fe frameworks.

    90% of the internet actually should just be rendered server side with a bit of js for interactivity. JQuery was fine at the time, Javascript is better now and Alpinejs is actually awesome. Nowadays, REST w/HTMX and HATEOAS is the most productive, painless and enjoyable web development can get. Minimal dependencies, tiny file sizes, fast and simple.

    Unless your web site needs to work offline (it probably doesn't), or it has to manage client state for dozen/hundreds of data points (e.g. Google Maps), you don't need a SPA. If your site only needs to track minimal state, just use a good SSR web framework (Rails, asp.net, Django, whatever).

    • railsdev@programming.dev
      ·
      1 year ago

      I loathe JavaScript heavy websites, especially when used for forms. Don’t break autofill and copy/paste. And don’t complain about the format just because I pasted! Seriously, why is pasting text in the correct format triggering some JavaScript framework? It all seriously gets to me.

      With that said, I really like Hotwire. HTML over the wire is bliss. Stimulus is perfect for sprinkling non-invasive JavaScript throughout an application.

    • GaveUp [she/her]
      ·
      1 year ago

      Preferring server side rendering is an interesting topic

      Client side renderering is currently the preference because the company gets to offload the compute costs of their servers onto the clients' devices

      As long as every website has a profit motive, even if it's just a single person trying to save some money on their AWS bills, server side rendering will never become the norm

      • murtaza64@programming.dev
        ·
        1 year ago

        The difference between generating JSON and generating HTML is minimal for the server, doesn't seem to me like server side rendered sites have significantly higher server compute costs. Also generally for SPAs, the server has to replicate whatever flow is happening on the client anyway to keep state in line (since the client can't be trusted)

        • GaveUp [she/her]
          ·
          1 year ago

          It's not just JSON and HTML. There's also graphic rendering and even machine learning models

    • derpgon@programming.dev
      ·
      1 year ago

      I do a lot of PHP, so naturally my small projects are PHP. I use a framework called Laravel, and while it is possible to use SPAs or other kinds of shit, I usually choose pure SS rendering with a little bit of VueJS to make some parts reactive. Other than that, it is usually, just pure HTML forms for submitting data. And it works really well.

      Yeah yeah, they push the Livewire shit, which I absolutely hate and think is a bad idea, but nobody is forcing me, so that's nice.

    • nayminlwin@lemmy.ml
      ·
      1 year ago

      I'm still hoping for browsers to become some kind of open standard application environments and web apps to become actual apps running on this environment.