It's been around nine years since Angular JS (the first one) was unleashed on the world. Nine years of single page apps (SPAs) in the browser, and constant innovation in the frameworks used to build them.
Dev.to has a great community of active, intelligent and helpful frontend developers who use a variety of frameworks to build SPAs. Perhaps some of them have been working in this area since the first Angular JS came out.
My question to anyone who's interested: is anything getting better?
Is it getting better for the users of our SPAs. What has improved for them in the last nine years - think of specific things. If you don't think it has improved, tell me - why not?
Is it getting better for the developers of SPAs? Is it easier today to build, say, a todo app than it was nine years ago?
Latest comments (62)
One interesting idea: ultimate "todo app" one-liner (ok... possibly fibonacci categories for runners up placement) compo? :-)
I think in general the 2010-2013 javascript / open source big bang explosion did an interesting phenomena: as driving school analogue, paradigm shift was from ordinary driving school to: "first learn chemistry of metallurgy -- to do the rivets and welds -- THEN do the driving learning part". Whether the dust has settled, and/or formed new interesting and swift galaxies, I'll make space for others to answer.
MVU has made things better for me as a dev. More on that in this comment. The tooling is still a hot mess for SPAs. It's actually gotten markedly more convoluted since Angular first came out. I remember not having to use things like Webpack to build a SPA. I had a minifier / bundler plugin in my IDE that would spit out a bundle for me. It wasn't perfect, but it was far simpler than Grunt/Gulp/Webpack/etc.
I'll put this on the user side, but I think there are more CSS frameworks available that make it easier to get started with a nice user experience. We use Semantic UI, for example. Another similar one I'm keeping my eye on is Bulma.
I think the advancements in CSS and the increasing knowledge of accessibility among developers are making things better for the user. Offline navigation is also a thing that the users notice.
We all have our confirmation biases, I know I do. The amount of tech that has been developed in the JS space in the last 4 years is partly that. I often read developers saying "We're making things better for devs, which makes thing better for the users" but that's not a measurable objective truth. It's partially true, it's partially bias.
There are measurable things like page speed, time to paint, time to first interaction and so on but are websites tracking this over the years? I'm not sure. Can you say with 100% certainty that the web apps you're developing now are 100% better or are you saying that your developer experience is 100% better? Even measurable things can be debated. Let's say I use "tech X" to make the initial time load a little faster, but then I use a service worker to download tens of megabytes of code in the background. Is it really a better user experience if I shave a few milliseconds, even 300 of them, if then I'm going to impact your mobile data plan?
I don't know if we're there yet but as clock speed teaches us, there's an upper limit of how fast you can go, let's say we hit that limit, would we still be able to say that we're improving UX? What about the fact that more JS can result in a lot of CPU usage on the user's computer? No one I know about really measures that.
On the other side of the argument, which I also agree with, is the fact that saying "is it really better?" needs context. All frameworks (including the ones I'm not citing but we all know) are developed to ease the life of the developer. The reasoning is that if my life is easier, then it's easier to deliver features and updates to the user experience. This is true in some cases. But is it really better for all developers? I don't know, that's where the complexity argument comes in by the side entrance.
I've never seen so many courses, tutorials, programs and learning material for frontend programming as I'm seeing these days, that's because it has gotten objectively harder for a single developer to learn "everything they need to know" in frontend. I often joke that backend programming is easier, but a part of me actually believes that. Not because one is better or worse of the other but because backend programming in its current form has been around for a long time, which helps to establish patterns, transferrable knowledge and so on and so forth. So yeah, frontend programming is hard, because it's not as mature as it will be a few years from now.
Unnecessary complexity is also intrinsic gate keeping, but that's probably another whole argument. It's funny because the big frameworks are born out of a need to manage that complexity, but I think we should learn a thing or two from the micro services hype a couple of years ago: yes, micro services are great but if your team is beyond a certain size, otherwise they just add complexity.
Another thing is the bias I was mentioning in the beginning. If I spent a lot of time learning a framework, whatever that is, I'm not going to be happy to know that I wasted time. The other day the Vue core team proposed a new syntax (which would have been additive, not a replacement), the community revolted, they backtracked saying that they are going to offer it as a plugin and support the current system for the time being. Kudos to them for listening, but this episode makes my argument as well :D We all have biases.
How all of this is going to make lives better for the user is anybody's guess. Static site generators are an interesting exception because, at least those who try to be accessible by default, have a direct impact on the user experience. If anybody using them is generating fast and accessible websites that use established patterns that's a great, great thing. I have no idea how accessible and fast a basic "hello world" website generated by Wordpress is, I truly don't know. Maybe it's as good, I haven't used Wordpress in forever.
So, to conclude, it's not all bad, it's not all good, we just need to reject believing our own biases too easily and ask ourselves "what am I doing?" from time to time.
BTW I think we should ask these questions to UX designers as well.
ps. I forgot to talk about developer happiness which is a big factor here, we are curious animals and a lot of us get bored easily. Feeding the brain with new things to learn can improve our productivity level and indirectly making things better for the users, literally because we are happy to implement those changes.
Short answer: no.
JS is polluted with "because we can" rather than efficient approaches to development. 2mb of Bootstrap as-is = bloated. 2gb of version specific node_modules = powerful and efficient.
I am currently working in Dart, Angular 4 & 7, React, and Vue on a daily basis (I manage teams) and I think that looking at the outcomes of the majority of the projects I have are needlessly complex to just say we use these technologies.
Code splitting is better and easier, so frontends don’t grow linearly. Also webpack and js modules make it so you can only use what you need from a given library. I think that saves the user a ton of unnecessary load time and in the aggregate has made the internet faster.
I never like Angular or all the popular frameworks. You can't build a large app with it. (Large is relative) which is why I created nimbleJs. I've just finished up the nimble use. A low code drag drop editor for the runtime.
Nimble is used to build and extend itself. Written in pure JavaScript. You can check it out
nimble-ide.com
Getting better? Getting more complex, certainly.
To me, frameworks are all solutions to the wrong problem. As I see it, the great majority of web pages can be described in fairly plain English. OK, there are chunks of functionality like Google maps and weather widgets, but these are standard library components that are imported, not created by the main page code. The rest is just a set of boxes within boxes and the description is quite simple. It's HTML (or JSX) which is line for line equivalent to plain English commands.
So the problem isn't with structure, which is what frameworks deal with, but with language. It's simply that JavaScript isn't as good as English when it comes to describing what a web page looks like.
JavaScript is a complex system programming language, but everywhere people are falling over themselves to add frameworks that are at least as complex as JavaScript itself. When did adding complexity become the solution to complexity? Where does it stop?
Programming a web page entirely in JavaScript is like playing golf with a single club. So let's have two clubs. Keep JS - with React and the rest if you choose - for the complex components that once written will never change, and do the UI and the business logic with something simpler.
Over the years a few computer languages have been created that look more like English than any of the mainstream programming languages. I cite HyperTalk, which eventually became AppleScript, and of course SQL. These languages start by asking what domain they are addressing; they don't aim to be totally general-purpose. Instead, they comprise commands specifically designed for the job in hand, making them easy to read and to write. Programs get shorter, leaving fewer places for bugs to hide, and long-term maintenance can be done by any intelligent person.
I write web apps using a high-level scripting language of my own devising, written in JavaScript and inspired by HyperTalk. The compiler and runtime (about 250kB) run in the browser and the scripts are raw text. If a complex item like a GMap is needed I code a 'plugin' that extends the language syntax to deal with the new API, so the main scripts never have a line of JS in them. My pages load quickly and because the system implements load-on-demand there's no limit to the size of app it can handle. And when other programmers see the code they can tell at a glance what it's doing, so who cares if it's a non-standard language?
Keep It Simple, Stupid. Then it really can get better.
In my opinion, it's getting better for devs, company and also and users :
Nowadays frameworks allows devs to build stuffs quickly without having to reinvent the wheel, so they can focus on what is more valuable for the end users while having less headaches.
We can now start and deploy a project in a few minutes thanks to many tools.
Also it makes employees more productives and happy because many things became easier, and as we know : happy employees make good company
And with quick valuable products made, it is also more economic for companies.
Like someone said in a previous comment, it is now more easy (thanks to PWA) to build/deploy apps through differents platforms and so reach more end users.
But how are devs reinventing the wheel any less? You can assert that, but is it true? How?
There's incredible churn and increasing complexity in front end development. Especially in the places that most impact end users.
Over the last 6 years a majority of products have probably been rewritten three times to jump on the bandwagon of the current most popular front end framework. Or if not rewritten most devs have probably worked on new products adopting each one.
This means the GUI (modals, dropdowns, accordions, typeaheads, etc) has been recreated in each of those frameworks each time. Has the end users' experiences with those rewritten components improved? Really, honestly changed for the better?
IMHO yes, a lot got better.
The first thing that comes to mind are tools like create-react-app and angular-cli. No more manual webpack-configuration. It's very easy to get started.
Another one is that native JS-modules are widely supported. No need to worry about bundling or transpiling until much later in a project (unless you need TypeScript or JSX of course).
How do those affect end users and improve their experiences with front ends for the better?
They don't. They improve developers' lives.
The past years have been of “lets invent new ways of writing the same thing to get in the spotlight and render a button 3ms faster”. The improvements are marginal and only benefit a few. The 80% of day to day projects I’ve seen take up all their time setting up the infinite chain of dependencies to build a simple site and as a side effect, making newcomers spend their time learning the frameworks and shielding them from learning real js. If you interview devs in the recruitment process you’ll see this. The big benefit I see is not for devs nor end users. It is for the company itself.
Years ago I remember devs were scarce and hired based on skillsets. Now, with frameworks and libraries companies don’t need skilled devs, they just need devs who know react/angular/etc and that is it. Making the process of moving devs as resources as simple as possible. In effect normalizing the dev. Not saying its a bad thing, but I do see way less creativity, experimentation and innovation going around these react days.
The only change I would say was transforming and positive for devs and users was html5 (geo, audio, canvas, workers, etc) and css3 (animations, transitions, media queries). Those apis allowed us to do new things not possible before, deliver new value for real world users. Not just a new cool way of typing the same thing to deliver exactly the same end value.
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