The "full-stack framework" fallacy
stack.convex.dev
stack.convex.dev
I am interested in knowing who would make a decision to pay for something like this when there are a gamut of open source options available. Like what is the compelling reason to use something like this.
To this question here, some of the things that accelerate full stack development:
1. Automatically updates your UI when DB data changes, not just on a per-document one-off subscription, but based on a whole server function's execution which is deterministic and cached. And regardless if the changes were made in the current browser tab or by a different user elsewhere. Not having to remember all the places to force refresh when a user updates their profile name, e.g., makes it way faster. And not only do the Convex client react hooks fire on data changes, the data they return for a page render is all from the same logical timestamp. You don't have to worry about one part of the UI saying that payment is pending when another says it's been paid.
2. End-to-end types without codegen. When you define a server function, you define the argument validators, which immediately show up on the types for calling it from the frontend. You can iterate on your backend function and frontend types side-by-side without redefining types or codegen in the loop.
3. Automatic retries for database conflicts, as well as retries for mutations fired from the client. B/c mutations are deterministic and side-effect-free (other than transactional changes to the DB and scheduler), the client can keep retrying them and guarantee exactly-once execution. And if your mutation had DB conflicts, it's automatically retried (up to a limit with backoff). So the client can submit operations without worrying about how to recover on conflict.
There's obv. a bunch more in the article about features like text search and other things out of the box, but those maybe are more conveniences on the backend, since maybe a frontend person wouldn't have been setting up Algolia, etc.
- Comparisons against other types of stacks, like laravel livewire or phoenix liveview
- Performance metrics/stats/benchmarks whatever. You need to be faster and more robust than the other things out there, or provide some other benefit
- First Class self-hosted on premise install version without dependency on any cloud provider. Kubernetes helm charts or docker compose stacks or whatever
- I do actually like that you have a time-windowed source available license. That is something that alleviates the concern if you go under
- Jepsen or similar analysis, need to make sure whatever consistency guarantees you are advertising hold up
For comparisons, you can check out:
https://stack.convex.dev/convex-vs-firebase https://stack.convex.dev/convex-vs-relational-databases https://www.convex.dev/compare/supabase https://www.convex.dev/compare/mongodb
I'll save you more of a marketing pitch, since you seem to have enough of my pitching Convex in the article:) The bullet points at the bottom of the article should be a pretty concise list - I'd call out the reactivity / subscriptions / caching. To learn how all that magic works, check out https://stack.convex.dev/how-convex-works
if you don't want to manage your own infrastructure, you can use our hosted product, but otherwise it's totally fine to self-host the open source binary.
(convex cofounder here)
Right now you have many frontend-focused engineers who justifyably argue that something like React Server Components is a backend concern because it runs on the server. I think they're wrong but they have a point.
You also have many backend-focused engineers who justifyably argue that something like Rails is a frontend concern because it's designed to run webpages. You probably wouldn't want to use Rails to build an ETL pipeline or an airline scheduling system, for example. I think they're kinda right but also a little bit wrong.
And ultimately the whole debate is so deep in the It Depends territory that I honestly think 90% of the people arguing come from such vastly different backgrounds and situations that they're just talking past each other. They're never going to agree because the problems they're solving are too different to ever have the same solution.
edit: I say this as someone with professional experience in almost all the usual suspects (Django, Rails, Flask, various JavaScript frankenstacks, even PHP).
Background. My career has spanned these in different ways:
Front-end: I started in iOS in 2010 (back then it wasn't called iOS yet - just iPhone), where I was a more pure frontend dev. The server was using python and Haskell and that team was the "cool kids" in my view. The backend/frontend contract was using ProtBuf over a socket (not WebSocket, which hadn't been standardized yet), so we really didn't work closely together, and no one was "full-stack".
Backend: Wanting to be a "cool kid" I joined Dropbox and eventually was the technical lead for Dropbox Previews, generating video, pdfs, images for user content using hundreds of machines, using a combo of Go and Python. I didn't work very closely with the myriad of teams using the previews for various products (their interface was the HTTP endpoints we exposed). One fun statistic: if you removed the cache and processed the full file for every user’s request, it would amount to processing over one exabyte of data per day.
"Full-stack" tbh my experience crossing the gap is only somewhat recent (last 5 years or so) where I did freelance / contracting for various startups and established companies. I brushed up on React, learned TypeScript, but still mostly focused on backends - which usually ended up overly robust for the level of operational expertise of the companies I was handing the projects off to: like handing off a full kubernetes setup for running some GPU machines and orchestrating some fan-in / fan-out pipelines for ML image processing, when I'm sure there were mostly-fine ML workflow companies I could have used.
Anyways this was much longer than anticipated but hope it adds some color
As a former JavaScript developer most of the people doing that work cannot program. That is why frameworks are so essential. What percentage of these people could realistically do any fraction of their jobs without third party abstractions line React or jQuery? It’s striking.
Look, what’s the primary mission here:
1. Put text on screen
2. Handle user events
Why is that so hard? Because nobody knows what they are doing, the blind leading the blind. The compile target on the front end is the DOM and that absolutely scares the shit out of people. Secondly, communicating outside the browser requires network traffic handling which also scared the shit out of people. Finally any kind of event handling requires an understanding of the event loop and listeners and that also scares the shit out of people.
Finally, most people cannot write in JavaScript. Instead they write Java (or whatever) and modify the syntax just enough to avoid critical run time failures. The blessings of a lexical first functional environment are often absent because the language is a mystery. Fucking horrible mess.
None of this is challenging. It’s stupid easy to learn, but there is almost nobody willing to teach it. The insecurity in that line of work is so universal I refuse to go back to that line of work for less than $500,000 salary.
It's not that you can't build a website without a framework, its that at the end of the day, no one cares what tools you use (in front end), it's how fast you get the job done, does it look like the mock up, and does it function.
No one cares if the site is written in vanilla JS vs. a framework except a certain segment of HN web purists.
Worse than that people who do that work also bitch about how shitty the results are too, but then continue writing garbage because that’s the best they can do.
True, but the only solution to this is "get good". Because using vanilla JS isn't going to make them any less likely to make a foot gun.
In my experience, the most brittle projects I've worked with tend not to be component-based SPAs. Maybe not necessarily because they're SPAs, but because they're component based, which in JS world, pretty much always requires the use of ES modules.
Even if someone makes some horseshit you can iterate away from it easily because (at least in the case of Vue), it's incredibly difficult to leverage global state (and discouraged, in programming in general, but also specifically bt Vue) and everything you do is encapsulated in components.
The JS projects that give me nightmares are the ones that use globals that are defined/populated/hydrated across different JS files, so the JS files have to be loaded in a certain order, or you get undefined reference errors and the like everywhere.
All of this is sorted out for you by bundlers and frameworks. And if you're not using a framework, you almost have to be good enough to make a framework to avoid all those pitfalls yourself.
At least that's been my experience with vanilla JS vs. framework JS in enterprises.
I really think the web purist rage about it comes from the fact that these individuals have dedicated years to perfecting exactly this craft (building little frameworks for themselves) and now complete noobs can make websites that look equally as sophisticated in 5 minutes. I don't think it really has to do with practicality as they claim. (E.g. gatekeeping)
Many webpages can and should exist with as little JS as possible, but the moment UX matters more than whatever bespoke concern is causing that restriction, you start having to think about the JS as a full fledged app vs. just some scripts bringing life to HTML (or you just delegate a bunch of UI code to the server).
I think if the website is primarily for reading static content, it makes sense not to use a framework. But once you are managing forms, reactivity, and rapidly changing demands from user feedback, it stops being easy to balance between creativity/flexibility in design and robustness.
And the reality is, most web developers are just working on some version or component of an ERP, which is a reactive data driven app that changes constantly to keep up with the business it's built for.
Frameworks usually facilitate rapid iteration in such products.
But I agree, installing 40 npm packages to build a blog is silly.
That is a common misconception that only occurs in software and is exceptionally common to JS. If you want to avoid foot guns set validation criteria: lint, test automation, strong types, and so forth. Contrary to what many JS developers suggest vanity is not a solution here and even that can be automated.
I had a personal project that was this peer-to-peer file sharing utility. I wanted test automation but was not aware of a test-automation utility for the browser in a peer-to-peer environment. So, I wrote one. When I changed the project from HTTP to WS I was about to execute up to 300 tests in about 8 seconds. That was very helpful. I found that since it was fast enough I could run this test automation all the time even before manually testing in the browser.
When I was at this consultancy last year that used Vue 2.0 tiny refactors were full of risks and could take up to 2 weeks. They had no automation of any kind and it scared the shit out of me. Making heavy use of strong types due to TypeScript I was able to execute refactors several dozen times larger in about 2 hours at almost no risk in a much larger personal project.
None of that means I am awesome. It just means that by putting the proper processes in place I was allowed to be really bad and could still release hundreds of times faster at low risk. At work I had to be astonishingly stellar when tip toeing around eggshells very slowly to release anything at all. I have been doing this long enough to see the same faulty patterns repeated.
The ideal path forward has to come from somebody that understands risk analysis, can measure things, and understands compound interest. That person could be an MBA who has never programmed before. Software almost always gets this wrong and does the opposite because it likes to repeat its failures. My repeated failure is not getting out of JS sooner.
The thing is, a developer can do all these things and make ugly UXes. They could also do none of them and make brilliant ones.
> My repeated failure is not getting out of JS sooner.
Have to agree. You sound like a strong backend engineer who was trapped in a frontend engineers body for years.
Most narcissist high on the hill comment I’ve ever read on HN.
GTFO.
At any rate your comment is exactly why I will not go back to that work for less than $500,000. Too much crying.