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Comment by kukkeliskuu | Hacker News Reader

Yes, I contradicted myself in that sense. I am not going to argument against your point.

But let me elaborate my approach which explains this apparent contradiction. Backend is needed in any case, and for me that is almost always Django. It is extremely fast to build traditional (non-SPA) CRUD apps with Django if you have only one model / one page. I can make a new one less than an hour.

If I need more interactivity or more data on the page, I use the same approach (models, views, forms with validation) but I create partial forms and return HTML fragments, instead of full pages. AlpineJS/HTMX allows me to implement 80% with Django/python, and I can avoid implementing a REST API and JSON serialization/deserialization, all the frontend data management, and there is usually almost no need for Javascript.

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> Backend is needed in any case

Well, sort of. Much as I hate the idea, maybe Next.js for everything is the way to go, bashing out a CRUD app there is very quick.

> create partial forms and return HTML fragments, instead of full pages

I loved that approach with Wicket and made systems that way for many years, but it just isn't good enough these days, at least for a website that's going to be used in more than one location. When it takes a network roundtrip to update your UI it's always going to be noticeable.

I assume you are talking about geographical distribution of the user base. I don't have experience implementing apps that require heavy geographical distribution, but why does REST/JSON work better for this?

I don't have experience with Wicket, but with HTMX, I have tried to make components very small. For example one switch button is one component. Loading that is very fast in my experience, as compared to reloading and rerendering all data with React etc.

> I assume you are talking about geographical distribution of the user base. I don't have experience implementing apps that require heavy geographical distribution, but why does REST/JSON work better for this?

Once you see the smoothness of fully local UI transitions compared to doing a WAN roundtrip, you can't go back, even if it's objectively not a huge difference. Things like switching between tabs, or hierarchical dropdowns where the choices in the second dropdown depend on what was chosen in the first dropdown, doing a network roundtrip to load an HTML fragment is maybe OK over a LAN but it's a nonstarter over the internet.

So your state management needs to be at least partially local to the frontend. And in my experience the only approaches available for that are a) React or b) ad-hoc hacks; some frameworks build the ad-hoc hacks into their builtin components so you get smooth local UI transitions as long as you're sticking to the happy path, but that ends up not being enough.

To me it sounds like it's time for you to get to know Elixir's (Phoenix's) LiveView. It does this even better and you barely write any JS at all.

That is on my list of things to learn. It is not high priority, though, because I don't think Phoenix LiveView is extremely boring technology at the moment. The user base is not large enough.

A lot of stuff is quite commoditized already, and I never found the size of a user base a convincing metric to judge by (not to mention the chicken-and-egg problem that you just demonstrated).

People are doing genuinely hugely impressive production-grade work there, and I am currently looking at a SigNoz dashboard while >200 users are frantically clicking on dozens of places in our UI (contains many reactive bits); our code is nowhere near optimal and we very rarely get >150ms response times, most are 20-50ms, and we're talking some quite tame machines (2 of them) with 8GB RAM and 2 CPU cores... and even then 90% - 99% of the time is spent waiting on the database.

The context of the discussion is how to create apps extremely fast. If I would optimize for something else, it would be a different story.

Oh well, if you find that way then many people -- myself included -- would be very interested in your blog post. Bootstrapping remains a tricky territory, not because it can't be done very quickly but because it leaves a lot of tech debt behind that has to be paid off, inevitably, at one point.

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