Comment by wrestlerman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wrestlerman | Hacker News Reader

I have the same opinion. Building SPA is f* hard and time-consuming. But it depends. If you know how to build SPA fast, then, by all means, go that route. (As a solo dev or small team)

I use Rails, but Rails views are a disaster. You can use a lot of different patterns/gems, but still, logic is highly coupled with the view layer. Personally, I like Phoenix approach with templates + views. But still writing script tags makes me cringe a little bit.

But I wouldn't discourage people from using SPAs, though. If you are gonna have a lot of buttons, modals, different tables, charts, forms and stuff like that, I would go SPA. Or first serverside -> SPA. Especially, when you are working in the team, it's so much easier to tell one person to craft this json api and another to craft this design with a consumer for the json api.

That become long... in short: if you have a small team or solo go server side 99%. If you have a big team or app that's gonna be very heavy UI -> go full spa or go server(mvp) -> spa

Take this with a grain of salt, as I only recently came across it and haven't used it, but the Trailblazer framework looks like it has a good way of getting logic out of the views.

I've been using parts of it on most Rails apps I've worked on for the last few years. The form object pattern (Reform) really helps when you need to update the same model in different places with different validations.

For example maybe an Order only needs a price when it's created, but needs a invoice number (and some other validations) when marked as paid, but an admin should be able to override those validations at any stage. If you are doing something like that with standard Rails the model is going to end up as an untestable mess, where as the form objects can be tested on their own.

My only complaint is that the creators of Trailblazer really don't seem to like Rails, so trying to get them to both work together can sometimes be a bit tricky. And the documentation is lacking if you want to do some more complicated things.

Thank you for your thoughts on it, I'm intrigued enough to really want to look more into it. Even if I don't get to use it, I think it will give me some ideas that I can apply to other projects.

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