Hacker News Reader

Comment by aabbcc1241 | Hacker News Reader

previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28511570

Quite surprised at how much people agreed with this post. I personally don't think this is such a good idea - it's not that hard to write a general purpose API that covers 80% of obvious use cases, and have app-specific grouping of endpoints for the remainder. And I include things like rollilng multiple requests into one as part of the obvious use case. Because it's usually very easy to implement - either copy/paste, or 5 lines for more complex solutions like an orm, graphql, etc.

It seems like a terrible idea to couple the backend with the front-end so strongly.

Seems like an over correction. Yes trying to make your front end API be your public API is probably a bad idea, but making your front end API completely coupled to the structure of your app structure is probably a bad idea too. Best approach is probably in the middle somewhere.

It probably comes from misusing the API route and feeling they want to keep it simple, but instead heavily coupling things.

A motivated BE that wants to be productive avoiding unnecessary work would probably hate being "support for frontend" whenever they decide to change something and a motivated frontend would probably want to turn themselves to full stack powers to not depend on someone else.

It feels really bad as a pattern unless that webapp is your only concern and is constantly moving or something, or if there's no actually FE or BE but just few people maintaining stuff as a side concern (backend for frontend works there).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com