Comment by jsiarto | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jsiarto | Hacker News Reader

Every time I see posts like this, I come back to warpspire's "Dumb Software:" http://warpspire.com/posts/dumb-software/

"But wait until you see the light! Software today is intelligent! Asynchronous front ends generated from esoteric scripting languages running on clusters of distributed virtual machines around the globe! Death to repetition! It’s more productive! It’s scalable! It’s fault tolerant! I followed the light and it only ended in darkness."

I also don't understand comments like "we can make drastic changes in the UI without any change on the backend"

In Wordpress or a Rails App, I can change the entire UI without having to touch any "backend" code (controllers, models, functions, etc). Am I missing something here?

we can make drastic changes in the UI without any change on the backend

This has always been possible with well-architectected systems, but more importantly it's mostly a platitude. It just doesn't happen in real life. "Drastic changes" to the UI are almost always driven by changes in requirements and hence they impact the entire system.

> I also don't understand comments like "we can make drastic changes in the UI without any change on the backend"

All they've done is to move a chunk of the backend into the browser. It's still there, running on an untrusted environment.

Well, for us updating a query for example is not much of a hassle. However, we often found ourselves quickly iterating on the workflows and UI elements. That, from experience again, has been traditionally much more painful to deal with when we had a more complex CMS underneath.

With a clean separation of client and server, we've been able to deal with these changes more easily, being able to prototype something HTML5 + CSS and quickly transforming this prototype into the real final product. Working with fewer layers in between you and the actual code (effectively HTML5 + CSS + JS helped too.

I'm not questioning your ability to be proficient at it with a CMS (or Rails). I am much more comfortable with our current approach though.

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