I’m glad this technique is making a comeback. The last 10 years of JavaScript on the client have been an utter shit show that left me wondering wtf people were thinking.
People have been pointing out it's a shit show with no end in sight for the entire duration of the phase. Pointing out the performance impact and cost to end users, how diabolical it is for those on lower latency or poorer network connectivity (i.e. most of the world), and so on.
Same thing as always happens with these pendulum swings, newer engineers come in convinced everyone before them is an idiot, are capable of building their new thing and hyping it up such that other newer engineers are sold on it while the "old guard" effectively says "please listen to me, there's good reasons why we don't do it this way" and get ignored. Worse, they'll get told they're wrong, only to be proven right all along.
I'm not denying there are obstructionist greybeard types that just refuse to acknowledge merits in new approaches, but any and all critique is written off as being cut from the same cloth.
It's perfectly possible to iterate on new ideas and approaches while not throwing away what we've spent decades learning ('Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it'), but tech just seems especially determined not to grow up.
"HTML over the wire" isn't really a return to the good ol' days. It's still the client maintaining state and using tons of js to move data back and forth without page reloads. It just changes the nature of 1/2 the data and moves the burden of templating back to the server.
It is amusing that they make a claim that reads a lot like "eliminate 80% of your Javascript and replace it with Stimulus". What is Stimulus? A Javascript framework.
Then, remember the awful awful #! URLs? Atrocious, and seemed like obviously a terrible idea from the start, yet they spread, and have mostly died, thankfully. But even with the lessons from these bad tech designs, new frameworks come out that repeat mistakes, yet get incredible hype.
It's why they used to be horrendously bloated with large javascript bundles that took so long to process on the client side.
Roughly speaking the idea was "We don't have any Javascript developers, but we do have Java developers. JWT allows us to bridge that divide". Neat in theory, and an understandable decision, but diabolical in practice!
A fair number of people would disagree. I'd say it's advanced a lot, considering the limited role of JavaScript on the client in the past.
Here's the Netscape Enterprise Server manual from 1998[1]. Sorry I couldn't find an earlier version.
1. https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19957-01/816-6410-10/816-6410-10...
Anecdotally, most people I see who really really love JavaScript are kids who haven't really don't much else.
I'd like to see these people make applications in pure XML. No programming.
And even with Hotwire, you're not getting rid of JavaScript entirely. You can write it with Stimulus. The idea is just that frontend web development has become a mess, and it's possible to simplify things.
> there's nothing inherently bad about it
Disagree.
This argument is so bogus if you look at alternative language dependency sizes.
My reasoning is that the numpy project is meant for scientific and prototyping purposes, but many times people are using it as an shortcut and include the whole thing into their project.
That being said, the quality in these packages does vary depending on who developed them. But I think this is a problem that exists with all languages where publishing packages is relatively straightforward.
> JavaScript frontends are becoming unnecessarily bloated
The bad experiences stick out to people, whereas all the well behaved JS-heavy apps out there likely don't even register as such to most people.
Even with SPAs, it's very possible (and really not that hard) to make them behave well. Logically, even a large SPA should use less overall data than a comparable server-rendered app over time. A JS bundle is a bigger initial hit but will be cached, leaving only the data and any chunks you don't have cached yet to come over the wire as you navigate around. A server-rendered app needs to transmit the entire HTML document on every single page load.
Of course, when you see things like the newer React-based reddit, which chugs on any hardware I have to throw at it, I can sort of see where people's complaints come from.