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Comment by zokier | Hacker News Reader

Maybe its just my bubble but somehow I seem to encounter far more commentary railing against these sorts of trends than actually genuinely promoting them, nevermind people claiming them as silver bullets. As such I can't really empathize with statements like:

> I wish I could say this was merely the problem our industry has, but it’s far worse than this. What we actually have is an industrial complex bent on manufacturing only hammers, committed to convincing you that only nails exist, and motivated to sell you a lifetime hammer subscription

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Microservices are definitely on the way down, but make any comment here or in a startup in the vein of "You don't need AWS/the cloud" and you'll see what's the real zeitgeist.

SPAs also get a lot of criticism here at Hacker News, but talk to a team of frontend developers and you'll get puzzled looks for suggesting rendering HTML directly in your C# or Rails monolith.

Please notice that I'm not criticizing or advocating anything, I'm just saying that there are trends and they're strong to the point of almost becoming laws. IMO this is what the article criticizes.

SPAs get flak because some people have strong opinions on what a website should be, completely ignoring that many if not most software companies make client-server applications where the browser just happens to be the software distribution method, and none of the big web ideas matter. SPAs fit right into what already was there in the form of desktop clients. In that space, MPAs were a trend borne out of the limitations of the browser, but there is no reason to go back now.

SPAs get flak because they’re being used incorrectly.

If they truly were only used as desktop-based apps, there would be less to complain about. As it stands, they’re packaged incorrectly for the mobile devices people use, caching is an afterthought so we’re loading the same giant bundles across mobile networks on each load, and this affects apparent performance. Then we have too much animation or inefficient component refreshing that reduces responsiveness…

Sure, if people always went the extra mile to provide the best experience, things would be better, but that has nothing to do with SPA versus MPA. Some things by default are cheaper with SPAs, some with MPAs, so the default annoyances are different - but neither gives a great experience for free.

Yes, for example drawio.com is an application that happens to have a version that runs on the web (not affiliated, but use it a lot). That's a very different situation from e.g. developer.mozilla.org, which is more text-centric and where being able to send someone a link to a particular section on a particular page is extremely useful.

SPAs are useful where needed. When overused they get the deserved criticisms, just like microservices or any other technology that becomes widely used beyond their scope.

SPAs are also useful even where they aren't strictly needed, which upsets the purists. Once you have decided that you orient your teams around SPA architecture, going the extra mile for whenever an MPA might do things better (by some metric) becomes a tough sell. The things that web developers believe should matter to users don't necessarily matter to the business as a whole. This is another instance of "worse is better".

I understand the SPA team argument but keep in mind how much complexity SPAs add to projects and how much more resources those teams eat. As a dev I'm okay with this as this enables more work for us devs but having done work with simpler technologies that were easier to maintain, were simpler and so on I can't shake the feeling of wastefulness SPAs give me.

> Once you have decided that you orient your teams around SPA architecture, going the extra mile for whenever an MPA might do things better (by some metric) becomes a tough sell.

Another aspect is here is that if you have people split up (more or less strictly) in backend and frontend devs, then SPA kinda follows naturally

Yep, I've been nearly cussed out for suggesting the code won't always be run on Lambdas. Nope, AWS Lambda is end-all be-all of code execution.

I think the commentary railing against these sorts of trends talks about them in general, whereas the commentary promoting them talks about solving particular problems. So if you ask "how to fix foo bar issue with my system design" you might get people suggesting how to solve it with one of these "hammers" instead of a broader condemnation of overuse.

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