I’ve been out of web dev for a while, but maybe the problem is there’s a new framework every 6 months and instead of delivering value to the end user, developers are rewriting their app in whatever the new framework is.
Just because someone solves a problem with a new library or framework does not mean they solved a problem for all of web development, and I think the current concentration of applications made with boring things sort of reflects that. [0]
> developers are rewriting their app in whatever the new framework is.
That is obviously an over-exaggeration. Most devs, most teams, most companies are not open to rewriting any application ONLY because it's a new framework. If they are, they probably have other priorities that point at X framework/library when rewrites do happen, because a rewrite is big enough already without having to also create the pattern/library code.
I will absolutely agree that we ignore the user more than we should. That should change. But I think people being excited about something on HN or some other metric of "a new framework every 6 months" isn't as causative as the usual hive mind would imply.
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1124699/worldwide-develo...
A lot of it was in react space, with router libraries or the newest data store being the thing you needed to be using. Definitely turned me off react, personally at least. The angular.js/angular2 migration was also a big pain around this time as well.
There was a lot of social pressure from influencers on youtube and various social media that you NEEDED to switch now. This was the new hotness, it was blazing fast, anything else was obsolete tech debt. There was one instance of 'or you should be fired' that sticks with me.
I think we're just used to the hyperbole and are all a lot more jaded now.
Compare this to the backend, where django, rails, and the others haven't really changed. I haven't felt the need or pressure to rewrite my views/controllers/whatever at all.
I wish I had something more coherent to say about this, but: I think this is true, and it frustrates and saddens me that anybody took seriously what influencers on youtube had to say. It seems so obvious that they are there to get views, but even beside that, that they don't know anything about my app or the problems my users have.
There’s still the problem of many library authors playing fast and loose with semver breaking changes and absolutely gigantic dependency trees that exacerbate the issue. That’s where most of my churn comes from, not new frameworks.
Vite has been great for the whole web-dev ecosystem, since it's super easy to configure, and very pluggable, so most frameworks are built around it now. That means you can write, e.g. a new CSS preprocessor, and if you make a Vite plugin, it works with (almost) every framework without extra effort
If you wrote your app in NextJS 2 years ago, you would already have to rewrite chunks of it to get it to compile today. These tools are NOT solidified, they are releasing breaking changes at least once a year.
The pace of development is definitely challenging. There’s so many libraries involved in any project that many fall behind in updating their code and application devs get caught in the crossfire when trying to upgrade (and woe be to you if someone added react = “*” somewhere in their peer dependencies).
But aside from all that topic, I have a question about Vite. Does it in any way bind you to using their service for hosting, or can one just as well and easy host such an app on ones own bare metal server?
And to add to what others have said, this stereotype never really held up in my experience either. Any serious web dev shop is going to have the framework they use and stick with it for both long- and short-term clients. And there are many mature options here.
I don't doubt this happens, a lot, but again, I think it's more about bad management than anything - and bad management will always make bad tech decisions, no matter the topic.
The constant frameworks churn is one attempt at solving the complexity problem. Unfortunately I don't think it's working.
I’ve been using the same backend framework professionally for over 10 years, and the same frontend framework for over 6 years. Clearly your thoughts on the matter are not reflective of reality.