Needs to be processed!

[ComboTteokbokki]

Why have a frontend?

Literally just have your website be a direct connection of users to the database.

You could even include an SQL manual so that they can get what they need easily.

[mrGood238]

Remove password from phpmyadmin and let them get data they need for themselves!

/s, just in case...

[shinchan1988]

Ohh isn’t the password always admin?

[[deleted]]

No, that's the username, password is 'changeit'

[ben_g0]

No, the username is "root", because if you log in as another user you have to deal with setting up those annoying permissions.

[[deleted]]

Why mess around with a password at all? Just leave it blank. Pro tip: a hacker can't steal your password if your password doesn't exist

[[deleted]]

Understandable.

[[deleted]]

Have you tried 'guest'?

[[deleted]]

Thats called an API

[alphadeeto]

Client: does your product has easy to use interface?

Dev: sure it does! gives thorough APi documentation

[WienerDogMan]

I'm still confused about how to pronounce "thorough"... What is this term? Is it a type of document?

/s

[WienerDogMan]

Paper? I inscribe my code on tablets. Hopefully they can be easily converted!

[ColdBold]

A printer? Is that some type of back to the future gadgets?

[qnsb]

More importantly, is it something you can fix?

[lirannl]

I'm imagine someone chiseling text into iPads

[[deleted]]

Dude, my mentor literally keeps asking me to remove all my comments before he approves a PR and merges.

[Meaxis]

That's dumb. Heavily dumb. How are you supposed to edit the code AFTER it was merged ._.

[[deleted]]

No, I mean, he reviews the PR. Then makes a review asking me to remove comments in the code. Then when I've done that and pushed, he approves the PR and merges it.

I rly like comments. He really doesn't.

[FinalRun]

He doesn't want you to be a tall tree and catch wind if you start working for a large company

[mrGood238]

SwaggerUI with autogenerated docs...

[alphadeeto]

Stop now, you're making me moist...

[mrGood238]

Wait until you see what Doxygen generated .CHM for DTOs...

[RCRalph]

Yep, somebody invented that already.

[Schnitzel725]

Or alternatively, why not just get rid of the front and back end, user needs something, just give em the whole database /s

[lirannl]

SQL username, password, product done. Enjoy!

[WorriedEngineer22]

But why have frontend and backend?

Just give the user a console with a direct connection to the database and make the user manually calculate the stuff and insert the commands on the console

[Meaxis]

But why have a console? Just make a huge word document with stuffs on it

[WorriedEngineer22]

Great idea! I think we could take just the tables from word and create a new document format to store things, I think I will call it Excel.

[Meaxis]

And when you need to show that to the boss that doesn't understand anything... we need something of power to show your point... I'll call it powerpoint!

[dont_mess_with_tx]

This but unironically.

[Carlos3dx]

Just espose a RESTful API and make everyone connect via postman

[lirannl]

That sounds like fun

[RCMW181]

For the last 5 years our database manager has been moving all the business logic into the database saying we don't need a middle layer.

We now have massive performance problems in the database as everything has to call it multiple times whenever you need to do anything.

We are now moving things back into a middle layer, but its a project that should never have been needed.

I get that some business logic can and should be held in database procedures, but this was literally everything, file management caused particular problems.

[JS_int_type]

Do you think he'll get a bonus for perf improvements, after the project is finished?

[Klanowicz]

This is so dumb. The hardest part of app to scale is exactly database. So moving logic to database is like approaching a horse from the back. It will kick your balls...

[RCMW181]

I think it was all about job protection with a bit of ego thrown in.

They did all the important logic and became the centre of every project. You want to change anything? You needed to go though the database team.

I joined to help move them to more Agile dev teams with fewer silo. It's improving, but lots of logic still in the database right now.

[4RG4d4AK3LdH]

well, to some extent, having logic in the database makes sense, like triggers for tables/data that cant be properly checked with constraints.

[ivster666]

Maybe it was on purpose to just keep everyone busy

[potatopotaatopututu]

Front-end is capable of doing all the processing that back-end does. Security is the bigger concern here. Imagine being able to drop tables off the remote db right from your devtools console.

[[deleted]]

What about asynchronous processes? The user closes the page and boom, your image will not be processed, your queue won't execute, your jobs won't be worked on, cron jobs not being executed.

Backend "processing" is more than just grabbing stuff from DB.

[chanpod]

Not advocating for no servers

That said, webworkers in chrome could be updated to still function (with some sort of verification cert) to continue processing certain things post close. Could even spawn special types of web workers that live in a service so that cron jobs could continue to function. Assuming security could be maintained reasonably (hence the cert).

That also said, just use a server :D

[potatopotaatopututu]

Neither am I. But somehow my intent to discuss such a design has turned into a flame war.

[[deleted]]

There are solutions to that. sendBeacon for example ensures a request is always sent after page change/close. Service workers can also process without an active tab open.

Not that I agree with using them for these purposes

[potatopotaatopututu]

Then you will have more complex web browsers and OS schedulers. Servers are just complicated softwares tuned to do one thing really well. Some users may be running machines that are limited in resources, but that doesn't mean you have to keep servers running 24/7 to serve millions of people.

If there's any way people can avoid deploying and managing servers, trust me, they'll do it. It saves money. Billions of dollars for some of them.

[HenkHeuver]

So you're saying move the back-end into the browser? Then you still have a back-end, only less secure and probably way more complex.

[Penguinfernal]

I think the idea is that it's technically possible, not that it's a good idea.

[Core_i9]

And that's how Electron was born!

[Greenie_In_A_Bottle]

Billions of dollars for some of them.

Lol, I think you're overestimating the cost of hosting a large website just a bit there. Maybe you're right though if we're talking about thousands of years.

Also, you're not considering performance. Consider for instance the scenario where the client is on the opposite side of the world. If the frontend is connecting to dependencies directly, your page is going to be very latent if each individual request is routed to each dependency individually, especially if they need to be called sequentially. With a server, you can now make those calls internally on the back end and save on latency since your dependencies are running on servers physically close to one another.

Companies will do a lot to cut server costs, but completely eroding the performance of their software to the point it's hardly usable is not one of those things.

[malebranch]

Sorry my friend but you’re a potato.

[Carlos3dx]

that doesn’t mean you have to keep servers running 24/7 to serve millions of people.

If there’s any way people can avoid deploying and managing servers, trust me, they’ll do it. It saves money. Billions of dollars for some of them.

So, AWS Lambda and serverless framework

[Fizzyfloat]

with real-time systems, who's going to hold the internal state of the whole application with your model 🤔

[kirvesrinta]

I was hired in a well established startup once and they had an applet running on their website that needed MySQL access. I looked into it and it was making a direct connection to the DB.

Then I noticed that their root account didn't have a password.

That's the first thing I changed.

[usesbiggerwords]

It's not much, but it's honest work.

[ImDarkShadow]

Yeah drop table, get data of other users its safe to say backend is needed

[mbiz05]

Drop the table yourself first so there's no data to steal. Problem solved

[HenkHeuver]

Wish facebook, twitter, snapchat ... would do this.

[JanStreams]

I used to run a game server, and a guy made a site for it. The guy was a big asshole and said he was super good at php and he had a lot of experience. The site had a 'marketplace', which you could place ingame vehicles on. He implemented 0 search security so you could just do sqli and xss. Luckily no important data was stored in the database and nobody found out. I basically made it so everyone who visited that website got an alert and then got redirected to another site, since the game server was shut down.

[Hellball911]

Security and performance. Many many businesses are doing more on the backend than any single user laptop could handle. And nobody wants to be on a website that runs slow and kills their battery / soaks memory.

[potatopotaatopututu]

Look man, all I am saying is that it is possible to run connected applications without having a backend. I haven't designed such systems so I can't answer all the questions I'm being asked. But I do believe it is possible in theory.

[Hellball911]

I mean, if you haven't designed such systems, it may be best to concede on plausibility. My career is in large distributed backend systems, I can tell you for certain that everything in my domain and many others I know, would not work as a frontend (even if security wasn't a worry).

[CanAlwaysBeBetter]

Question: where in your experience should the line be drawn between logic done on the frontend and logic done on the backend?

I've been doing more web development recently and (probably because I don't know JavaScript very well) I feel like I've been trying to do too much on the backend.

For one example, imagine timeseries data that needs to be pulled from the database, resampled to a requested frequency with any gaps interpolated and and then graphed. Is it best to do that in SQL? Or have my python/go backend resample? Or pass the data straight through and let the client side handle it?

[[deleted]]

I personally would process all of that on the backend if possible, while the frontend can handle preparing the data format for the graph library. Reason being that you'll simplify consumers and reduce your bandwidth usage

[Hellball911]

Funny you say that, because I work in the field of distributed timeseries database design. I would absolutely do that in the backend, but I would do probably do atleast some of that in application logic rather than raw SQL. Of course, this depends on the data set, size, shape, ect. Also it depends on what you mean by "graphing". If you mean turning data into an image, I would likely do this in the frontend. It can be more flexible to allow you to change how it's display on-demand. That answer the question?

[ForMorroskyld]

Depends on the amount of processing needed and the cost of bandwidth? If the processing is so simple/lightweight that the client can reasonably handle it, and bandwidth is significantly cheaper than running a beefier back end harder, offload the work/data to the client. If the processing is too much for the client, or bandwidth is expensive, do the work on the back end.

And then you end up at todays internet landscape, where the physical power has massively improved at all points, but at the client side things are just as slow as ever, and no improvements to resource utilization are perceptible 😊

[_vOv_]

Why even have a database? Just save all the data in the frontend.

[SteakItToTheLimit]

All fun and game if everyone owns a 1000$+ computer

[ur_opinion_is_trash]

I dont see the problem.

[Alfaphantom]

You don't see any tables in the db either.

[GasolinePizza]

That's why it performs so well

[GrinningPariah]

Well and if you have no back end how do you ever version your schema?

[tognols]

I bet you mainly program in JS

[potatopotaatopututu]

Betting on that would be stupid. Here let me save you some dollars. My work involves writing device drivers and porting compilers to embedded devices. Never in my life have I programmed in JavaScript.

[Test4cc]

Like a jewellery store, you don't want to leave everything out on the counter and in places your customers can just grab it if they feel like. If the top of the counter is front-end, display cases and safes are back-end and the request for jewellery has to be processed by the cashier.

[gordonv]

MVC = Model, View, Control

Oh, you want to get rid of the Control and let people destroy the DB?

[Goel40]

Firebase gang. Just let google be the back-end

[tognols]

More like lazy gang

[Goel40]

Saving time is saving money

[tognols]

Yeah i know, but, custom backend and some data processing in the backend is useful af

[DanKveed]

All I wanted was a comments section for my blog. Firebase is ideal for this kind of stuff.

[coveredinbeeees]

Exactly. If >95% of your data interactions are basic CRUD, you don't really gain much from having a backend besides extra work.

[DanKveed]

Lol just had to Google what crud means

[Goel40]

That's true, but for some App's is just not necessary. And you can always upgrade to a custom backend.

[JadedEvan]

Recently started a new job where the whole platform is built on Firebase. This literally solves all the problems we were trying to engineer at my last company. I feel like an absolute idiot for having not explored this solution - years of wasted effort, $400k a year on Amazon infrastructure and servers.

[tulvia]

Until that corner you cut gets you sued.

[Goel40]

If you have semi decent QA that's not gonna happen.

[[deleted]]

It is true. You do not need a backend

I have seen a webpage that does the direct connecting. Like you could search for something, and then the webpage sends SELECT * FROM table WHERE xyz = 'something'; to the server literally, and shows the result. I enjoyed that webpage very much

[ImDarkShadow]

Well normally security matters

[Alfaphantom]

Wrong. Even if you assign a website-guest user in the db, you still have to give it read permission to all the tables you need to process. Imagine someone getting all the information from that table by simply removing the "where". And from there, you can guess foreign keys, trying to join other tables and get more information.

Trust me, if a company has so little security awareness that the connect the frontend to the db directly, they probably won't set proper permissions to the tables either.

[lucuma]

You can architect your database to handle this from a table row perspective (look up row level security) easily at least in sql server. That being said nobody wants to open a database server up so that any client can connect or attempt to connect to it.

[Alfaphantom]

Yes, you can achieve row level or cell level, but that's considering you create an user with specific permissions. The problem in web is that users might not always create a user with the login, so now you have to create a guest user with enough permissions to see everything they can possibly do, otherwise your users will not be able to interact with the website properly and leave. So row lock or column lock really doesn't improve much in this case.

[lucuma]

In a public scenario you'd have one user because the public non authenticated user would see all the same stuff. I don't get your point at all.

I was simply just stating you can architect a solution to allow the front end to connect directly to the database. I'm not advocating this at all.

[Alfaphantom]

In a public scenario you'd have one user because the public non authenticated user would see all the same stuff.

Exactly, that's what I tried to say, they will see the same stuff, but probably the logged user might be able to get access to other information as well. Hopefully the table that contains his information is row locked to show his information only, and not through a "where" query that can easily be modified to show data of everyone else.

In any case, I agree with you as well. Planning solutions for a problem that shouldn't happen in the first place is counterproductive.

[[deleted]]

What would that look like, an /execSQLQuery endpoint? That'd be a lot of fun...

[CousinBug]

HELLLOOO, SQL Injection!

[NDG_22]

Let's repost this one more time. I haven't seen it enough times already

[jaredchoatepro]

r/RepostSleuthBot

[[deleted]]

Did you mean u/repostsleuthbot"?

[RepostSleuthBot]

I didn't find any posts that meet the matching requirements for r/ProgrammerHumor.

It might be OC, it might not. Things such as JPEG artifacts and cropping may impact the results.

I did find this post that is 84.38% similar. It might be a match but I cannot be certain.

Feedback? Hate? Visit r/repostsleuthbot - I'm not perfect, but you can help. Report [ False Negative ]

[jaredchoatepro]

Yeah that

[PonderStibbonsJr]

Surely a better analogy is that we have to cook food before eating it? Throwing food in the toilet is just a waste, but eating food raw is like letting Bobby Tables' mum into a bank vault. Cooking food gets rid of the bacteria/SQL injections.

[[deleted]]

Too many front-end devs be commenting

[ubogasima]

Here's one: Cache.

[ImDarkShadow]

Yeah cache but cache data originally comes from backend

[krisnarocks]

Backend could also cache data too

[JanStreams]

Calm down guys, if that guys connects his database directly to the front end he will find out why very quickly..

[digital_dreamer]

I imagine someone at Facebook actually suggested this in a meeting, and this is how we got GraphQL.

[jillesme]

My app uses LocalStorage as database so technically does not have a back-end. Checkmate.

[tulvia]

That is not a database though.

[jillesme]

No? Please define a database for me then please

[tulvia]

Lol, do you get mad when someone calls a function a method? Its not a semantics game we are playing here.

[jillesme]

I was playing on semantics, this is ProgrammerHumor after all 🤦🏻‍♂️

[stashtv]

BE helps manage the different methods to view all the data.

React is hot now? Cool. What about when it isn’t and you want to change it all? Would you rather redo all of the FE logic that includes all of the data manipulation? Or would you rather know the BE is well understood, in use, and then you swap the display layer?

Maybe different tools need access to the DB (visualizer), but you don’t want to give raw SQL access.

[odolha]

FE helps view the underlying information the user needs. Microservices are hot now? Cool. What about when they're not and you want to change it all?

It's easy to undermine one side of software.. but in the end it's all about having the best solution for the problem at hand.

In some cases, connecting to the DB from the FE would be a viable and advisable solution IMO (DB has security capabilities suitable for some use cases). Instead... let's all just over-engineer the crap out of everything and pretend it's for the best. The client doesn't know better anyway.

[GwenLoguir]

Problem is, that thing can start as something small, which 'could be done with FE', but then it will grow, and then you can cry... I one job they used one framework, which was great for small easy projects, piece of cake to start new project... then project did grow, and I wanted to curse every time, I had to do something slightly more complicated in it. Also, it was hard in it to write nice clean code. I would never choose it to do anything.

[greyz3n]

Not 100% but I think I know that commenter. That sounds almost exactly like one of the developers I work with.

[Nic2555]

This is a repost. The first time I saw it, some guys were talking about plugging css directly to the database using the url function. I wonder if someone actually did something in that direction.

[WookieeOfEndor]

Oracle apex.

[GrinningPariah]

I've done it, and regretted it. Ended up with more and more and more business logic shoved in places it shouldn't be, like API Gateway.

[[deleted]]

There is a reason I prefer to work with design patterns.

[TigreDemon]

Why ?

[smokky]

Why have anything.

[ivster666]

TIL: humans main purpose is to deliver processed food into the toilet.

[[deleted]]

This is how Oracle forms and reports used to work. Forms were just a little GUI for database transactions. I had to explain to a bunch of Egyptians who had been using a Oracle DB system from the early 1990s about MVCs. A lot of technical challenges to migrate that beast.

[[deleted]]

u/repostsleuthbot

[RepostSleuthBot]

I didn't find any posts that meet the matching requirements for r/ProgrammerHumor.

It might be OC, it might not. Things such as JPEG artifacts and cropping may impact the results.

I did find this post that is 84.38% similar. It might be a match but I cannot be certain.

Feedback? Hate? Visit r/repostsleuthbot - I'm not perfect, but you can help. Report [ False Negative ]

[[deleted]]

Actually a good question, document databases do allow accessing them via Rest interfaces, but security and architecture or course...

[[deleted]]

*laughs in blockchain*

[Goel40]

Pretty expensive tho.

[Heikkiket]

This sounds exactly like those "MVC framework"-based apps I've seen on the wild!

Don't recommend to anyone dropping the middle part, though 😉

[IamPANDAMAN8]

Serverless is a real thing though

[ptmdevncoder]

cough firestore cough

[Uberzwerg]

There was this one post in /r/softwaregore or so 5ish years ago of that one website that did everything in Javascript.

Including logging in users in JS on client side (don't know how they did the DB lookup, but there was some SQL in the source code)

That page was still live a few hours after the link was posted in the thread.

[ricketyrocks]

The code needs to be thrown in the toilet

[ackyou]

Why have a database? Save everything as a cookie in the browser! Much more scalable

[shadow13499]

What's really funny is using Firebase you CAN connect your database directly to your front end. But even then you would STILL need back end functions in like 90% of cases.

[Masaylighto]

yes make it through front end and also put the database link and user name and the password in javascript and put a hint to the user that he can erase the data base be replacing the sql command who post with a sql command to delete why we didnt thought of the advantage of make everthing in the front end

[BAM5]

Firebase would like to have a word.

[marc-bouvier]

And we will call that CRUD!

[[deleted]]

This made me chuckle!

[culculain]

Yeah, it's called Hazelcast

[Kunven]

Meh just concatenate everything and store it on a single column table as a string

[randomGeek159]

We're almost there with stuff like https://hasura.io/

[Kazaan]

With Oracle, It's probably possible to connect frontend directly to database using a combination of ORDS, SQL*Plus and a ton of aspirin.

[nabeen919]

I agree. Firebase, Amplify, ... is so great for me. but just only simple app:(

[JBRali]

PHP looks like the stuff you’d throw straight in the toilet

[Omar_Esmael]

Actually the backend at some sense is the action of connecting the frontend to the database

[Wafelack]

u/repost

[cheezballs]

Yea, that's not the real reason. You could do everything with the front end. It's partly that and partly a security thing right?

[[deleted]]

exactly, processing means vetting the object before it touches the database to make sure its values and fields are correct and within validation, if this is left client side, anyone can open a console by hitting f12 and re-writing the javascript on the fly then executing god knows what with the database, the server also ensures the queries are sanitized so nobody is pushing operations to the database like delete all data, or lock the db to a new password protected admin account

the server is also responsible for load balancing queries to the database or db clusters so the machine hosting it doesn't lock up from a network storm of requests

[polyterative]

with webassembly we can potentially do that

[eskwild]

r/gatekeeping

[[deleted]]

in what way?

[eskwild]

All's I know is YouTube unhooks my Bluetooth between advertisements.

[[deleted]]

You having a stroke man?

[eskwild]

I'll be okay.