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Comment by _heimdall | Hacker News Reader

Basically all of Tailwind CSS. Inline styles are nothing new, neither are utility classes, or the scalability issues of inline styles that led to Tailwind reinventing classes with their `@apply` macro for creating component classes.

Edit for another: RPC calls are really old and went out of style maybe 15 or 20 years ago in most codebases. Most of the modern JavaScript metaframeworks are now using RPC calls obscured by the build/bundling process.

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Thank you for mentioning Tailwind. Every time some young dev talks about how Tailwind is "forward thinking" I just want to scream into a pillow. This is also the case now that SSR is becoming popular again.

I can deal with the SSR becoming hip again, but can we please settle on either back or front-end rendering? Either was good, but trying to combine the two is evil.

SSR is the most mindblowing of the lot, it's gone full circle.

I mean granted, I've worked with e.g. Gatsby for a while which is SSR on the one side but a hydrated SPA with preloading etc on the other making for really fast and low bandwidth websites, but still.

RPc calls ala SOAP may have been obsoleted but things like gRPC were and are the building blocks of many large companies.

Sure, I'm not saying RPC isn't used today or that it doesn't solce specific problems.

It is a reinvention of an old idea though. There was around 15 years where RPC rotted on the vine until Google brought it back for (mostly) the enterprise scale, and another 6 or 7 years before JavaScript frameworks rediscovered it again for fullstack web applications.

… Eh? The predecessor to gRPC seems to have started internally at Google in 2001, and Google open-sourced it in 2015. In 2001, CORBA was all the rage; by the mid-noughties this had been replaced with SOAP, and maybe Thrift rpc in trendier places. I gather there was a whole parallel Microsoft ecosystem with DCOM and things, though that wasn’t my world and I don’t know much about it. But the point is that there hasn’t been a time where some form of RPC wasn’t in fairly common use since at least the early 90s.

The details change, and each one tries to solve the problems of the past (typically by inventing exciting new problems), but conceptually none of these things are _that_ different.

I may have completely missed a generation of RPC tooling. I was thinking specifically about web development in this context, but in general I don't remember hearing anything about RPC use between the early 2000s and mid to late teens (other than legacy systems maybe).

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