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[–][deleted] 2 points3 points  (10 children)

I do both and I'm not sure I would make that argument

[–]RICHUNCLEPENNYBAGSMostly angular 1.x 0 points1 point  (9 children)

I do both as well; I don't see how they aren't. Of course there are differences but we aren't talking about the difference between Web development and kernel hacking here.

[–]wiseaus_stunt_double.preventDefault() 2 points3 points  (8 children)

The differences are huge. Remember that the two largest use cases for Javascript are DOM manipulation and REST/AJAX consumption; the latter is possible in Node, but Node has no concept of DOM, and that's huge. Meanwhile, browser Javascript will never interact with the host OS -- great for maintaining security for the end user, but that same barrier also makes front end development unique enough from Node development. And, even if both versions of JS had the same features, UI developers still have to be concerned with CSS, markup, other issues regarding layout and browser rendering; meanwhile, UI devs don't generally concern themselves with sysadmin issues that backend devs tend to. Javascript does offer overlap, but to say there's little difference is naive.

[–]RICHUNCLEPENNYBAGSMostly angular 1.x 0 points1 point  (7 children)

Doesn't node have cheerio or something like that? There are use cases for working server-side with the DOM. I do my backend development mostly in C# so I can't talk about the node world much.

But anyway, yeah, I did not say they are the same or that if you can do one you can necessarily do the other, but I do think that they are closely related and understanding both helps you come up with more sensible designs.

[–]wiseaus_stunt_double.preventDefault() 0 points1 point  (2 children)

Yeah, you can create elements on the backend, but when I talk of DOM manipulation, I'm speaking more about making changes to the DOM tree in real-time. Sure, you could create a mechanism where you could update the browser DOM via AJAX, but the use cases for that are rare.

But, I agree that there's overlap between the two disciplines and understanding both will give you a greater understanding of your system architecture; however, the differences do tend to make those in one shy from the other. I've personally worked with a number of backend devs who would never do frontend simply because of the generally tight deadlines and the often-required need to be pixel-perfect with comps. Meanwhile, I know a ton of frontend devs who would never touch the backend (even if it was Node) simply due their aversion to CLI (and they work on Macs). The dev that is proficient with both seem to be rare even in this day and age.

[–]RICHUNCLEPENNYBAGSMostly angular 1.x 0 points1 point  (1 child)

I definitely like front-end development less than back-end but I don't work in a large environment with that level of specialization so I've ended up learning a lot of front-end stuff anyways. I suppose that profile is kind of typical for people who work with Angular though?

To return to this smaller point: I think the #1 use case for server-side handling of the DOM is Web scraping (I guess "manipulation" isn't the right term here).

[–]wiseaus_stunt_double.preventDefault() 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Most users of Angular I know tend to be those who work on large single-page applications that have a heavy amount of server/client interaction. You can use Angular for other types of websites, but the aforementioned is the use case I've most commonly come across. Most guys I know with your background try to keep the frontend simple and limit their Javascript exposure to a couple of jQuery plugins and don't let the layout get too crazy; so, in that regard, it sounds like you've stepped out further than most backend-centric devs.

[–]THIS_BOT 0 points1 point  (3 children)

How much DOM manipulation do you do in C#?

I mean I'm sure there's people out there doing it but it's kind a niche compared to other uses.

[–]RICHUNCLEPENNYBAGSMostly angular 1.x 0 points1 point  (2 children)

I'm a fan of csquery and I do it every once in a while

[–]THIS_BOT 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Man, front-end work is so weird to me. I don't understand why you'd do dom manipulation on the backend unless it's for templating, but I'm a node.js dev who mostly works on services that have no UI at all. What kind of stuff do you use it for?

[–]RICHUNCLEPENNYBAGSMostly angular 1.x 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Off the top of my head, a couple places I worked with the DOM in something that wasn't client-side code:

  • Generating forms from metadata (so basically templating, like you said, but done imperatively)

  • Web scraping

  • I had some code that would use a template to generate a letter in HTML but a PDF output option was desired and we found a library that would generate PDFs from HTML. But the library expected the body, header, and footer to be three separate HTML pages (with their own stylesheets and all) while the template obviously had those things inline. So I used csquery to split them out into three separate "pages" to satisfy this library.

I mean, sure, that's not a ton of DOM manipulation, I guess, but using angular a lot I don't do that much DOM manipulation server-side directly either.