This is an interesting article.

And he gets a lot of things right – having a way to do queries against a database directly, being able to get changes directly is useful.

And GraphQL, for example, offers exactly that – there’s even a plugin to directly build a GraphQL API from your postgresql database. Although this still can’t send changes over the net, so you can’t have an always up-to-date view of the database.

But while this and Firebase¹ solve the problem of offering an API directly for a database, he’s missing to address the other task frontend servers do: They can render stuff on the server, in case you actually do have just a dumb terminal.

And that’s something that’s very useful for websites, as usually servers are more powerful than smartphones, and you need to do your computations somewhere. A web service applying deep dream to an image can’t run it in the phone, nor in the database – it has to run it on a specialized server

But it’s indeed a good question why there’s little academic research into changing the way web applications work. We’re already making databases directly open via GraphQL APIs, we’re separating statically hosted content into CDNs, so how can we combine this, and work truly "serverless"²?

[1]: Firebase is a great tool for prototyping your app, but if you want to run it it’s usually too expensive, and relying on proprietary Backend-as-a-Service technology has proven to be a bad idea already when parse.io shut down.

[2]: Serverless here meaning that you have no specialized application server – you have a general database able to handle all your applications, a general CDN, and all special code for the app is handled within the database, or triggers of it.