Every action, every button click, basically every input is sent to the server, and the changed dom is sent back to the client. And we're all just supposed to act like this isn't absolutely insane.
Basically you write only backend code, with all the tools available there, and a thin library makes sure to stich the user input to your backend functions and output to the front end code.
Honestly it is kinda nice.
Websockets+thin JS are best for real time stuff more than standard CRUD forms. It will fill in for a ton of high-interactivity usecases where people often reach for React/Vue (then end up pushing absolutely everything needlessly into JS). While keeping most important logic on the server with far less duplication.
For simple forms personally I find the server-by-default solution of https://turbo.hotwired.dev/ to be far better where the server just sends HTML over the wire and a JS library morph-replaces a subset of the DOM, instead of doing full page reloads (ie, clicking edit to in-place change a small form, instead of redirecting to one big form).
It's extremely nice! Coming from the React and Next.js world there is very little that I miss. I prefer to obsess over tests, business logic, scale and maintainability, but the price I pay is that I am no longer able to obsess over frontend micro-interactions.
Not the right platform for every product obviously, but I am starting to believe it is a very good choice for most.
LiveView does provide the tools to simulate latency and move some interactions to be purely client side, but it's the developers' responsibility to take advantage of those and we know how that usually goes...
The problem with API + frontend is:
1. You have two applications you have to ensure are always in sync and consistent.
2. Code is duplicated.
3. Velocity decreases because in order to implement almost anything, you need buy-in from the backend AND frontend team(s).
The idea of Blazor Server or Phoenix live view is "the server runs the show". There's now one source of truth, and you don't have to spend time making sure it's consistent.
I would say, really, 80% of bugs in web applications come from the client and server being out of sync. Even if you think about vulnerability like unauthorized access, it's usually just this. If you can eliminate those 80% or mitigate them, then that's huge.
Oh, and thats not even touching on the performance implications. APIs can be performant, but they usually aren't. Usually adding or editing an API is treated as such a high risk activity that people just don't do it - so instead they contort, like, 10 API calls together and discard 99% of the data to get the thing they want on the frontend.
Say I want to draw a box which has many checkboxes - like a multi-select. A very, very simple, but powerful, widget. In most Web applications, this widget is incredibly hard to develop.
Why is that? Well first we need to get the data for the box, and ideally just this particular page of the box, if it's paginated. So we have to use an API. But the API is going to come with so much baggage - we only need identifiers really, since we're just checking a checkbox. But what API endpoint is going to return a list of just identifiers? Maybe some RESTful APIs, but not most.
Okay okay, so we get a bunch of data and then throw away most of it. Whatever. But oh no - we don't want this multi-select to be split by logical objects, no, we have a different categorization criteria. So then we rope in another API, or maybe a few more, and we then group all the stuff together and try to splice it up ourselves. This is a lot of code, yes, and horribly frail. The realization strikes that we're essentially doing SQL JOIN and GROUP BY in JS.
Okay, so we'll build an API. Oh no you won't. You can't just build an API, it's an interface. What, you're going to write an API for your one-off multi-select? But what if someone else needs it? What about documentation? Versioning? I mean, is this even RESTful? Sure doesn't look like it. This is spaghetti code.
Sigh. Okay, just use the 5 API endpoints and recreate a small database engine on the frontend, who cares.
Or, alternative: you just draw the multi-select. When you need to lazily update it, you just update it. Like you were writing a Qt application and not a web application. Layers and layers of complexity and friction just disappear.
A web application should either be server-generated HTML with a little JS sprinkled in, or a client-side application with traditional RPC-like calls when necessary.
Blazor (and old-school .NET Web Forms) do a lot more back-and-forth than either of those two approaches.
When I say traditional client-server applications, I mean the type of stuff like X or IPC - the stuff before the Web.
> A web application should either be server-generated HTML with a little JS sprinkled in, or a client-side application with traditional RPC-like calls when necessary.
There's really no reason it "should" be either one or the other because BOTH have huge drawbacks.
The problem with the first approach (SSR with JS sprinkled) is that particular interactions become very, very hard. Think, for example, a node editor. Why would we have a node editor? We're actually doing this at work right now, building out a node editor for report writing. We're 95% SSR.
Turns out, super duper hard to do with this approach. Because it's so heavily client-side interactive so you need lots and lots of sync points, and ultimately the SERVER will be the one generating the report.
But actually, the client-side approach isn't very good either. Okay, maybe we just serialize the entire node graph and sent it over the pipe once, and then save it now and again. But what if we want to preview what the output is going to look like in real-time? Now this is really, really hard - because we need to incrementally serialize the node graph and send it to the server, generate a bit of report, and get it back, OR we just redo the report generation on the front-end with some front-loaded data - in which case our "preview" isn't a preview at all, it's a recreation.
The solution here is, actually, a chatty protocol. This is the type of thing that's super common and trivial in desktop applications - it's what gives them superpowers. But it's so rare to see on the Web.
No, the point of the API is to loosely couple the frontend and backend with a contract. The frontend doesn't need to model the backend, and the backend doesn't need to know what's happening on the frontend, it just needs to respect the API output. Changes/additions in the API are handled by API versioning, allowing overlap between old and new.
Code is duplicated.
Not if the frontend isn't trying to model the internals of the backend.
Velocity decreases because in order to implement almost anything, you need buy-in from the backend AND frontend team(s).
Velocity increases because frontend works to a stable API, and backend doesn't need to co-ordinate changes that don't affect the API output. Also, changes involving both don't require simultaneous co-ordinated release: once the PM has approved a change, the backend implements, releases non-breaking API changes, and then frontend goes on its way.
This is the idea, and idea which can never be fully realized.
The backend MUST understand what the frontend sees to some degree, because of efficiency, performance, and user-experience.
If we build the perfect RESTful API, where each object is an endpoint and their relationships are modeled by URLs, we have almost realized this vision. But it cost us our server catching on fire. It thrashed our user experience. Our application sucks ass, it's almost unusable. Things show up on the front-end but they're ghosts, everything takes forever to load, every button is a liar, and the quality of our application has reached new depths of hell.
And, we haven't realized the vision even. What about Authentication? User access? Routing?
> Not if the frontend isn't trying to model the internals of the backend.
The frontend does not get a choice, because the model is the model. When you go against the grain of the model and you say "everything is abstract", then you open yourself up to the worst bugs imaginable.
No - things are linked, things are coupled. When we just pretend they are not, we haven't done anything but obscure the points where failure can happen.
> Velocity increases because frontend works to a stable API, and backend doesn't need to co-ordinate changes that don't affect the API output. Also, changes involving both don't require simultaneous co-ordinated release: once the PM has approved a change, the backend implements, releases non-breaking API changes, and then frontend goes on its way.
No, this is a stark decrease in velocity.
When I need to display a new form that, say, coordinates 10 database tables in a complex way, I can just do that if the application is SSR or Livewire-type. I can just do that. I don't need the backend team to implement it in 3 months and then I make the form. I also don't need to wrangle together 15+ APIs and then recreate a database engine in JS to do it.
Realistically, those are your two options. Either you have a performant backend API interface full of one-off implementations, what we might consider spaghetti, or you have a "clean" RESTful API that falls apart as soon as you even try to go against the grain of the data model.
There are, of course, in-betweens. RPC is a great example. We don't model data, we model operations. Maybe we have a "generateForm" method on the backend and the frontend just uses this. You might notice this looks a lot like SSR with extra steps...
But this all assumes the form is generated and then done. What if the data is changing? Maybe it's not a form, maybe it's a node editor? SSR will fall apart here, and so will the clean-code frontend-backend. It will be so hellish, so evil, so convoluted.
Bearing in mind, this is something truly trivial for desktop applications to do. The models of modern web apps just cannot do this in a scalable, or reliable, way. But decades old technology like COM, dbus, and X can. We need to look at what the difference is and decide how we can utilize that.
Server side rendering has been with us since the beginning, and it still works great.
Client side page manipulation has its place in the world, but there's nothing wrong with the server sending page fragments, especially when you can work with a nice tech stack on the backend to generate it.
For instance, I've seen pages with a server-linked HTML button that would open a details panel. That button should open the panel without resorting to sending the event and waiting for a response from the server, unless there is a very, very specific reason for it.
This is insane to you only if you didn't experience the emergence of this technique 20-25 years ago. Almost all server-side templates were already partials of some sort in almost all the server-side environments, so why not just send the filled in partial?
Business logic belongs on the server, not the client. Never the client. The instant you start having to make the client smart enough to think about business logic, you are doomed.
Could you explain more here? What do you consider "business logic". Context: I have a client app to fly drone using gamepad, mouse and keyboard, and video feedback and maps, and drone tasking etc.
Main downside is the hot reload is not nearly as nice as TS.
But the coding experience with a C# BE/stack is really nice for admin/internal tools.
I've been loosely following the Rust equivalents (Leptos, Yew, Dioxux) for a while in the hopes that one of them would see a component library near the level of Mantine or MUI (Leptos + Thaw is pretty close). It feels a little safer in the longer term than Blazor IMO and again, RSC for react feels icky at best.