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What are your programming hot takes?
(lemmy.ml)
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this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2023
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Programming
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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).
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
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)
That should be true, but have you looked the HTML of any "modern" site? Dozens of nested elements, each tagged with multiple lines of attributes. Generating that is probably 10x the cost of generating the JSON.
Plus, with server side rendering you also have to recompute the HTML for the entire site, which often means re-computing a whole bunch of non-trivial queries as well.
This is actually why I really like HTMX, you load a page once, then make AJAX requests that return html which you can use to replace or add to the DOM. It provides an interactive front end where the backend provides full rendered html partials. Simplifies the entire application by keeping logic and state only on the server, which means you never have to worry about synchronizing front-end and backed state.
It's not just JSON and HTML. There's also graphic rendering and even machine learning models