Comment by hnuser847 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hnuser847 | Hacker News Reader

I feel your pain. My career happiness peaked around 2014 or 2015, when I was writing Rails monoliths. I felt like I could focus 100% of my energy on business logic since the framework was so opinionated and the stack was simple. Things went rapidly downhill after that, once microservices, SPAs, node.js, NoSQL, and serverless computing started becoming popular. Everything just felt like a step backward. Microservices made simple things (like transactions) impossible. Express felt like a degraded version of Sinatra. NoSQL, frankly, is utterly pointless, and I have no clue why it ever caught on. Serverless computing is interesting in some respects but the places that I've worked that have gone all in on AWS were total disasters. SPAs are definitely useful for rich, interactive front-ends, but the trend to make everything a SPA and render everything in JS is totally nuts.

I ended up switching to a PM role, where I can focus on the business problems without having to worry too much about the implementation. I do miss coding a bit, but it's not fun enough to do full time anymore.

>NoSQL, frankly, is utterly pointless, and I have no clue why it ever caught on.

It caught on because "feature factory" startups used simple frameworks to make an MVP and didn't know shit about RDBMS administration, optimization, or schema planning so when it was schema migration time it was time for things to start breaking. With NoSQL (specifically the "document store" types) you could just keep throwing shit in there whenever you needed it -- magic schema migration! And it was "Web Scale"©!

I've been through projects that gave schema migrations and when there was any mistake or error during schema migrations it was a real big pain to rollback, fix and release. With mongodb this is gone, schemas are no more of an issue as long as you make sure to keep the models sane and the business logic of the fields up to date.

Schemaless means anything can come put of the DB, or be put onto it. It adds a lot of work to the app developer to keep things validated and secure and there are more exceptions to handle. Definitely a trade off. Never had big issues migrating schema-ed databases.

Sorry, but when I see "Web Scale" or "MongoDB" I can't help but recall https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs

And I think that’s why some stacks like Hotwired and Phoenix have decided to let the server handle a bunch of common JS use cases so that you don’t need some all of the frontend complexity like with React

I still work on a Django monolith and agree on being able to focus 100% on business logic. I've found Angular is excellent for "sprinkling" a little JS into the frontend where necessary rather than going the full SPA/React route.

How is Angular adding just a sprinkle of js to your web app? Isn't the ouput of building an Angular app a full SPA?

I am using the "original" angular-js, not the newer Angular whatever version it is now. It's not a full SPA. I just include angular.js and put the ng stuff in my HTML. Maybe the new Angular is different?

Yes, angular 2 (which means anything after angularJS) is a full on SPA just like react is.

I think stimulus is more like angularJS. But modern angular definitely isn’t.

I worked on multiple Django monolith projects in the past years where parts of it with heavy client-side logic were offloaded to tiny Vue.js applications injected into the html template.

If data requires reloads or manipulations a side restful api needs to be created along the main endpoint which renders html. But it's fairly straightforward with DRF and the enforced by default apps/models structure of Django.

Until a certain point I find this arrangement enjoyable to work with. Once it stops, it's clear as day that the page should be rewritten from scratch with rendering on client side.

Have you tried htmlx? It fits this gap quite nicely, it's lets you do AJAX with SSR.

This resonates* heavily.

I moved to writing web-code for personal purposes only. Now, I specialize in other types of technical areas for paycheck purposes (C++, Git, PM support, computer HW maintenance and procurement, similar overly niche technical tasks, etc).

Spot on. Rails just let you get shit done. All we needed was a Rails for Node.js.

https://mojojs.org/ might just do the trick?

Rails for Node.js is Next.js + Prisma

You have never used Rails, have you?

From the top of my head, you'll also need libraries for:

- Background jobs - Validation - Translations/i18n - CSRF and other common security considerations - Testing (and integration testing) tools - Logging - Email sending - File uploads (S3 storage, etc) - Websockets

And then write the glue code to make all of this work seamlessly, document it for others to understand how you made it work together, ensure there are no security holes and battle test it in production.

Saying that Next + Prisma "is Rails for Node" is like saying a moth is an airplane just because both can fly.

Well said. There are a million starter projects and examples each with a different mix of tools hooked up all in very different ways with tons of files and config. And lots of them with bugs or out of date.

The problem with the JS world is they can never coagulate around one solution. Everyone has this insatiable desire to roll their own. Next only works because it leaves out a bunch of stuff.

Instead of the examples/ directory they should build a plugin interface and roll out official integrations with lots of tools. This is the closest we would come to Rails.

I think a big part of this is because of the the popular teachers and bloggers/youtubers which are not more than undercover (and some not even undercover) marketers for companies or solutions promoting the use of their platforms.

So many "Look how easy it is to build a blog with Next.js/Remix/Nuxt.js/Whatever", and it is true. That's really easy and cool and has a really good DX and we all love it.

But in real life you need a ton more things to make things robust and secure. And when people start to patch together stuff to get, let's say, authorization or authentication, into their apps, is when things go wrong and you end up getting emails of "data breaches" from services you signed up to.

Had you used a battle proven full stack framework, 90% of the problems would have been solved in standard, well documented, secure and proven ways.

In the node ecosystem, the opportunities are right there. From what I've seen and tried, Adonis.js is the best thing that has happened in this regard. A real "full stack" framework following Laravel's ideas. It's opinionated, fully featured and well integrated as every feature works nicely with each other. And you're not handed over 40 decisions to make about the ORM, the templating system or how to do permissions. It's all there ready and documented. As with Laravel or Rails.

We just need to have people understand that there's a *very common* set of features every single non-trivial web application needs and that it makes no sense to rewrite it from scratch on every single project.

What scares me the most is all of those people saying that implementing all of this themselves or by tying together 10s of libraries every single time is easy. To me they just don't know what they're doing and what they're getting into.

Thanks for the pointer to adonis.js. I have been playing with just nextjs and nextauth and getting those to play well is a bit of a headache (middleware doesn’t seem to work). I assume an all in one solution stuff has been tested together!

There is a Laravel for Node.js - https://adonisjs.com/

And Laravel is essentially Rails for PHP

+1 for Adonis. I've been using it for some time, together with unpoly + alpinejs and it's a real pleasure. I'm really productive with this stack. In fact, their docs site is built using these tools: https://github.com/adonisjs/docs.adonisjs.com/blob/develop/p...

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