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Comment by serbuvlad | Hacker News Reader

I find everything about web technology nowadays to be extremely obtuse.

I am mostly an embedded/Linux driver engineer, but I think I know the basics of HTTP, REST APIs, Docker containers, how the web works overall etc.

But, like. What are we doing?

What do you mean make the billing backendless? Obviously there has to be a backend to process the payment. What are you even saying? You are presumably not building a distributed blockchain - and even that requires permanent nodes.

Same with serverless (which are just Edge Functions and could just be called that, or serviceless, if you really wanted to define it negatively).

If these people named NoSQL, it would be called databaseless.

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I believe the marketing material around serverles functions is at fault. Clearly there is a server, because there is a computer answering requests on a specific ip address mapped to dns. So the wording is maddening. It’s a bit like cgi-bin except it spins up a vm or other sandbox to run the serving code instead of just starting a process.

Functions-as-a-service was a better descriptor.

This is just billing as a service.

Oh, so there is a billing backend. It's just managed by someone else.

Then yeah, just call it billing as a service.

I just dislike the wording of it all. "You don't have to do the billing in the backend, you can do it on the frontend". As if the frontend and the backend were mythical realms fighting for control.

We went from PHP generated websites, to PHP backend generation bad, use "client-side rendering" and "single-page applications", as the shiny new thing.

Then we went to Server Side Rendering (SSR), as a new thing. What do you mean a new thing? You're just doing in Node what everyone was doing in PHP 15 years ago.

And that's fine!

Not every idea has to be revolutionary, not everything has to be "the future", or "the only way".

You've found a service that does billing for you without having to integrate it into your backend. Great! Amazing! Good for you! I'm sure it's of interest to a lot of people!

But why can't you just, you know, say it like that?

Give yourself some credit here, I'm a web developer who works on billing systems and I also have no idea what it is that they mean. My best guess is that they're making a marketing message that they do not have a very particularly annoying workflow of a very particular billing integration (Stripe webhooks maybe?).

My problem is when you know that workflow, and that integration... you actually don't need it, its just nice to have. Its just a way for Stripe to send you updates to an endpoint with the status, like if say a card has declined as the charge is closing. But you can just poll.

One day there will be a type of web developer who completely dismisses the concept of running a backend and instead whips out their wallet and subscribes to a dozen SaaS providers instead. Literally everything else will be client side inside NextJS.

It's not really backendless more like outsourcing backend.

They encoded the billing rules into the fabric of spacetime, making them a fundamental property of the universe. Now there is no backend anymore, only reality.

That will be $6.62607015e-34 please.

>If these people named NoSQL, it would be called databaseless.

Lmao, this is way too good. I'm going to steal this.

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