“Second-Guessing the Modern Web” ↦

Tom MacWright writing on his blog:

The emerging norm for web development is to build a React single-page application, with server rendering. The two key elements of this architecture are something like:

1. The main UI is built & updated in JavaScript using React or something similar.
2. The backend is an API that that application makes requests against.

This idea has really swept the internet. It started with a few major popular websites and has crept into corners like marketing sites and blogs.

I’m increasingly skeptical of it.

I’ve always been skeptical of it but it is very interesting to read this from the perspective of someone who had embraced React more fully than I had. Mr. MacWright has worked on the front-end for both Mapbox Studio and Observable, both of which are largely implemented in React.

Mr. MacWright identifies four areas where single-page applications (SPAs) have settled on some “messy optimizations” for frequently-encountered problems with SPAs:

1. Bundle splitting
2. Server-side rendering
3. APIs
4. Data fetching

But I’m at the point where I look at where the field is and what the alternative patterns are — taking a second look at unloved, unpopular, uncool things like Django, Rails, Laravel — and think what the heck is happening. We’re layering optimizations upon optimizations in order to get the SPA-like pattern to fit every use case, and I’m not sure that it is, well, worth it.

[...]

But the cultural tides are strong. Building a company on Django in 2020 seems like the equivalent of driving a PT Cruiser and blasting Faith Hill’s “Breathe” on a CD while your friends are listening to The Weeknd in their Teslas. Swimming against this current isn’t easy, and not in a trendy contrarian way.

I’m old enough to remember when frameworks like Django and Ruby on Rails felt cutting-edge but they have both now become boring, stable projects. Is it such a bad thing, though, to build on such a tried-and-true foundation?