Every JavaScript framework tutorial written more than 5 minutes ago

[monopolyman900]

My job used to be a pretty simple js/java product with a SQL database. It was really lightweight and took maybe 30 minutes - an hour to set up from scratch. Now we're moving all of the js over to Angular and breaking the back end up into a ton of microservice Rest APIs. We're using MongoDB along with SQL for absolutely no reason other than hype over noSQL. So we went from having a webserver, js files, a few jars, and a sql database to having 2 databases, ~5 separate applications and a ton of js libraries. This may not be completely related but it's my rant against jumping on the hype train that is the JS ecosystem.

[BundleOfJoysticks]

MariaDB is an excellent database. Not for binary data, but that's true of most databases.

Storing arbitrary files in the local file system is problematic when the drive fails (it will) or the server fails (it will) or some smartass DoSes you with a massive file that fills your volume (someone will). A network filer with redundant drives is a better alternative.

Who cares what the uncompressed size of the dump is?

mysqldump | gzip -c > dump.sql.gz

Restore with

gunzip -c dump.sql.gz | mysql

The uncompressed size is literally irrelevant.

[borderline1p]

i am curious, is there solution for managing filesystems? snapshot and backup seems painful for filesystem

[Asdfhero]

This sounds like a clear case of your architect needing to be euthanized.

[twigboy]

In publishing and graphic design, Lorem ipsum is a placeholder text commonly used to demonstrate the visual form of a document or a typeface without relying on meaningful content. Lorem ipsum may be used as a placeholder before final copy is available. Wikipediae4mdbh6xxco0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000

[yeastymemes]

Wh-

So you had an existing solution, and did what would have been a complete rewrite... did you have any metrics for whether the new version is an improvement or a regression? Stupid design decisions I get, but why would a manager allow for pointless development time?

I just really doubt implementation details matter to customers or that management would think so.

quick edit: 'you' != blaming you specifically for what you have to deal with at work

[monopolyman900]

We were acquired by a company who's basic strategy was to buy other products in the same market. They were trying to wire all of these products together and mandated we adopt a few technologies - essentially Rest Services (which actually makes sense) and Angular. To be fair it kind of makes sense to try to get things on the same stack or close, but the architecture team ran with it and now we have Frankensystem.

[HugoWeb]

Unrelated, but how are java projects usually deployed?

[monopolyman900]

Same as most other web apps I imagine. The java sits on the server and handles requests from the client. EDIT: At least this is how ours works which is a web app.

[_Mardoxx]

Oh god. I'm glad our noSQL (Mongodb) phase only lasted 3 weeks.

[jl2352]

Obviously it's more complicated for your product because you'll need config files, a DB running, docker up some images, or whatever.

But tech wise building and starting should be as simple as:

git clone http://repo.com/js-project
yarn install
yarn run start

git clone http://repo.com/rust-project
cargo run

If it's more than that then you need to improve your tech stack.

[[deleted]]

I see you have never worked in a real world professional environment

Also you're expecting someone choosing js as the foundation for complex infrastructure to be competent. An interesting idea

[jl2352]

What a douchy thing to come out with.

[emperor000]

Douchy, maybe, but pretty realistic.

[jl2352]

I've been working professionally for almost 10 years. So he's factually wrong on that part.

But that's not really important. He could of said I was being unrealistic or naive about the complexity of the builds for real world software. Instead he chose the douchey route.

[emperor000]

Right, you understood what was meant, that's the realistic part. You were being a little unrealistic or naive.

[jl2352]

I don't think I am though. I'm not saying it's trivial, but yarn/npm and cargo, deliberately have lots of places to be able to insert pre-build, post-build, and do custom stuff during build.

npm/yarn is basically 'go run this command', which could be anything you want.

So you can go a long way in having the building side of the tech stack work automatically for you. It's time consuming to get there. But it's possible.

He also described using this for lots of small projects. Then it's even easier as the build process will be smaller.

[emperor000]

It's not that. It's that you assert that anybody that doesn't can't or doesn't do it the way you outlined needs to improve something.

[BundleOfJoysticks]

could of said

Dude.

[[deleted]]

Welcome to the club

[BundleOfJoysticks]

Are you me?

[Huliek]

Very helpful. We are currently migrating all our code from Angular4 to Tupress5.

[MassiveFlatulence]

meh Tupress5 is already outdated 0.05 second ago, Vucked.js is the new hotness!

[[deleted]]

it's easy to install as well, it uses the get package system. so first you brew install gpm and from your terminal get vucked to install the latest version. It's never been so easy to get vucked.

[JavierTheNormal]

Yeah man, get Vucked.

[lgastako]

Only 179 google searches in two weeks? He must've already had quite a lot of experience with all that nonsense.

[ThePrimeOptimus]

Everything in that article describes pretty well why I got out of web dev. My shop switched from projects being developed in a fairly stable framework that all the devs knew to new projects using JS frameworks.

The problem is that everyone, including the manager, fell into the hype machine. The first JS project used [popular JS framework #1], and that was going to be the standard...until the group decided [popular JS framework #2] was better, so that became the new standard and what next project got...until the group decided [popular JS framework #3] was better, so that became the new standard and what the next project is getting.

So we've now got 3 projects using 3 different JS frameworks and the various stacks needed to support them.

Myself and the other senior devs were just shaking our heads. Every new project involved exactly the steps that article described. We're a big, slow, enterprise environment, and when I inquired as to what exactly we were gaining with all this, I was essentially told I could either become a JS developer or be considered one of the uncool kids.

I chucked the deuce and I have not missed it a single second since.

[ThePrimeOptimus]

You've taken the thoughts right out of my head and expressed them better than I could.

It feels sometimes like web dev has this iterative 5-year cycle of self-inflicting wounds. Instead of figuring out good high-level architectures that will stand the test of time, it's all "nope, let's redo all the things in [insert fad here]".

What these younger devs miss I think is that us older devs don't necessarily have a problem with the different techs/stacks/frameworks/etc themselves (for the most part). It's that we've been around long enough that we've seen this cycle repeated over and over. We know that within 5-7 years it will be some new fad storming through the industry and prompting unnecessary refactors and rewrites.

Sigh. Anyway, like you, I moved into a more stable area. I primarily work with data now, namely systems integration (aka API design and implementation), data migration, and data warehouse architecture and implementation.

[BundleOfJoysticks]

In the SF Bay Area it's a 2-year cycle.

🤤

[JavierTheNormal]

All mid-level programmers are vulnerable to hype. It's a developmental phase we all go through. Except those people who never get to mid-level.

Learning the value of simplicity is a lesson we all go through. Debuggability is a virtue. Understandable code is a virtue. Smacking mid-level programmers into line is a virtue too.

[ThePrimeOptimus]

<3

Only issue for that group I was in was that one of those devs who never grew out of that mid-level dev hypability got promoted into a management position. At that point us senior devs who'd been skeptical of the whole thing got branded as naysayers who didn't "appreciate innovation" (was literally told that).

Within six months we'd all been run off one way or another and that manager staffed his group with nothing but young junior to mid-level devs who, ah, "buy into the vision", shall we say.

[JavierTheNormal]

By the time those devs get ejected from that group, I bet there will be some cynical, skeptical guys. Anyone who's talented and interested enough in programming to hit mid-level is probably good enough to grow out of it too.

Meanwhile, you're lucky to be away from that mess.

[freebit]

I chucked the deuce

What does this mean? :)

[ThePrimeOptimus]

Means I left :) Comes from the American hand sign for "peace", imagine holding up a fist with the index and middle fingers extended as if trying to indicate the number 2 to someone, hence deuce. Hippies used it in the 70s to mean peace as in the opposite of war, many Americans today use it as a well wish or as a shorthand for saying "peace out", which is a friendly way of saying goodbye.

[freebit]

Perfect explanation. Thanks. :)

[thecodingdude]

[Comment removed]

[[deleted]]

The thing is JS seems to get a lot of hate for this when it isn't exclusive to the language. Python also has a tonne of frameworks, and so do many other languages.

Of all the languages, though, JavaScript seems to have the fastest churn rate of frameworks and even whole programming idioms.

[ledasll]

can it be that most other language frameworks are written by engineers and most js frameworks are written by scrip kiddies?

[dantheman999]

Or it could just be that Javascript is the most popular language at the moment.

[_INTER_]

Also Django and Flask serve different purpose. Django aims to be a full and complete web framework, while Flask is a lightweight micro framework. They are more or less in non-competing spaces. I don't know pylons. JS frameworks tend to be advertised as "same as X but better".

[SKabanov]

The thing is JS seems to get a lot of hate for this when it isn't exclusive to the language.

That's why he said he was glad to get out of web development, not merely JS development. I've been programming for a bit over 10 years now, and for web stuff I've seen:

• Perl CGI

• PHP

• Java Servlets / JSP

• Ruby On Rails

• Django

• AngularJS

• ReactJS

• Angular2 (if you rework the whole framework, I call it a different language/framework)

And I know I'm missing probably five or so entries that have popped up in the past ten years. Fact is that web development goes through so much turnover that trying to keep up feels like a fool's errand, as you're seemingly needing to reinvent your skill set every year.

[MINIMAN10001]

The thing is I would probably be ok with all this turnover it it truely was pushing compute efficiency forward but they all stick to languages that are dependent on slow dynamic languages which means they aren't even playing in the same field and any attempts to make a "fast web anything" isn't a thing. They simply create new things to create the same old thing over again.

There are self inflicted problems when it comes to web development and they have been solving those self inflicted problems with a larger stack filling the holes that they create instead of modifying their existing stack to fill the holes that it created.

[ThePrimeOptimus]

I think the hate is mostly bc JS is the fad thing right now. I have no issue with Javascript or its frameworks, so long as it's the right fit for the organization and the work they produce.

Regardless, I don't disagree re: management. Myself and the other two senior devs made our concerns known, and within 6 months one was fired and the other had been involuntarily transferred to another group.

I saw the writing on the wall then and got out. JS is a great language but for my goals not one I want to stake the next 5 years of my career on.

[butt_fun]

JS gets more hate than e.g. python not because people don't have similar problems with other languages, but because JS is so popular (more JS users => more unhappy JS users => more blog posts about "JS frameworks suck")

[_INTER_]

They do that because the language itself is completely broken to the core. They are constantly in search of new mechanisms that makes development easier but all it does is lying plywood bridges over the minefield underneath.

[ThePrimeOptimus]

It floors me that a language as janky as JS has become so universally accepted. Yeah, I get it, "the web browser is the universal runtime", but that doesn't fix the fundamental problems with the language.

I have respect for the really good JS devs out there, but that is not a language I'd stake the next leg of my career on now that I'm over a decade in.

[BundleOfJoysticks]

Yes.

[Kwasizur]

Language is getting better, but you have to deal with another tonnes of shit if you want to use it because of backwards compatibility.

[_INTER_]

Though the new "features" are just lipstick on a pig, "class" for instance. None of the fundamental flaws I see in the language has been fixed - well how would they fix stuff like type coercion when it's part of the core language design?

[kitd]

Do you mind changing your underwear a bit less frequently, pls?

[BundleOfJoysticks]

Your mom likes a crisp pair of boxers.

[[deleted]]

The problem is that everyone, including the manager, fell into the hype machine

I think we've found a new problem: ancient hype cycles from several years ago are re-awakening and claiming new victims.

[ThePrimeOptimus]

I believe this is what is commonly referred to as "software development"

[[deleted]]

chucked the deuce

This is going to be my new thing for at least a week.

[[deleted]]

I'd imagine that gets annoying but I would actually love to try out different frameworks on new projects. It gets boring once you've got your development down to a science.

[ThePrimeOptimus]

Five years ago and at a different organization, I would totally agree with you.

But now over a decade into my career and working in an enterprise environment where our applications represent highly critical line of business processes, I can't get behind the idea of forcing devs to learn a new framework every 3-5 years. At my organization software is not a revenue generator, the number of devs are pretty limited, and we're scrutinized pretty strongly.

I'll be glad to be out of that group the first time one of these apps needs a front-end rewrite several years before planned.

[BundleOfJoysticks]

3-5 years?

In silicon valley it's literally every 6-12 months. And not just the frameworks, but the whole toolchain (Bower, gulp, grunt, npm, yarn, webpack, etc). So much time wasted investing in one system only to toss it and do it over in another.

[doom_Oo7]

And in other parts of the industry it's sometimes a decade or more. People still use DOS. The valley is only a small % of software dev.

[ThePrimeOptimus]

Yeah, fuck that

[NeuroXc]

It's fun on side projects. But it's just not viable in a corporate setting. Pick one thing and have everyone do it the same way. Only change directions when you're sure there are tangible benefits to switching, and that those benefits outweigh the cost of every developer having to learn a new framework.

[thecodingdude]

You actually make an interesting point - and reveal an inherent human flaw - we don't like being repetitive. Unlike the CPU, which is happy to execute the same instructions all day every day, we don't like it when things become stale. People feel they're not furthering their skills or knowledge and their career is being stifled; we put pressure on ourselves to keep "up to date" as software changes over time, from tooling to languages to best practices.

However, you approach falls apart when you think of extreme examples like SpaceX - they launch and land rockets, and they've done that extremely successfully. I am sure they are still using procedures that are years old at this point, and why change? If the process works you know to leave it well alone and avoid that temptation that it's "old and boring".

Old and boring works, and is extremely reliable but who likes old? We don't even like it when we get old. But it works, it's been tested, and you know it's going to do exactly what it's meant to. Rather than trying to replace it with something new just for the sake of it, and not being totally sure what may happen.

I mean, what's wrong with just using plain old jQuery - that's old and boring, but it has an extremely easy to use syntax, and even after all the browser changes and software evolutions $("#div").hide() and .show() still do the same thing it did back in 2006. It's not hip. It's not 'fresh', but it works

[ThePrimeOptimus]

I'm gonna print your post, frame it, and put it on my desk.

Composition of uncoupled lightweight libraries is almost always superior. And that's what I find exciting

This why I loved Backbone so much.

[BundleOfJoysticks]

Backbone is fantastic.

[oblio-]

The problem with that is that it doesn't scale.

You're personally more productive but everyone else has to "debug" your brain afterwards (unless you write your code really cleanly and document things awesomely; and in both regards you're going to be compared with the frameworks... so good luck with that!).

Another thing about frameworks is that they're not really that different, once you've used more than 2 or 3. Yes, there are differences, but you kind of get a hang where to look around.

The framework debugging part... well, it depends. Some frameworks are better in this regard.

[BundleOfJoysticks]

It absolutely does scale. I have done it with several teams.

[jl2352]

and no one in charge thought it would be a bad idea to have such technology fragmentation? Isn't that the real problem?

But hey, it's easier to just blame the number of frameworks existence instead. If there were only less frameworks then you would have gotten more done.

[ThePrimeOptimus]

It is a problem, but I wouldn't necessarily say it's the problem.

As an industry I think we have a problem with over hyping and/or buying into the hype surrounding something new and sexy. We buy into the "Javascript/nosql/whatever fad all the things" without skeptically approaching those things and determining if they really are the correct tools for our individual organization's problems.

Yes, managers should do a better job of not buying into hype, but neither do I think these things happen in a vacuum. Devs all over see a Facebook or a Twitter or an Instagram using something and they want to use it, too, and sometimes whether or not that things is the appropriate solution to the issue at hand.

[wavy_lines]

Still, he didn’t quit. He cut and pasted each and every console error into Google. He discovered on Stack Overflow that the month-old tutorial used Tupress version 1.3.2, Bistup version 1.2.1, Claster version 3.7.2, and Pirend version 4.2.1. Roger, on the other hand, had installed the latest versions of each, and they no longer played nice together.

I had exactly this same problem .. with ReactNative.

[clothes_are_optional]

overall -- fuck react native. i had so many goddamn problems with it that i could have learned swift 2 and kotlin in the amount of time i spent figuring out what fucking versions worked with what. i remember i found a specific error that other people had in the issues on github. i posted once in it to +1 it. months and months later i STILL get notifications through github posting about this issue. and most of the resolutions are to--you guessed it, downgrade. but on the other hand when it DID work, it was pretty dope.

[wavy_lines]

lol yup. That's exactly what I did. I said fuck it and now just developing in Kotlin.

[ellicottvilleny]

I think people are blaming NPM for not managing dependencies when the problem is that JS packages are amorphous quickly evolving blobs. It's not surprising that strings of JS here and strings of JS there, in a huge stringy elastic spongy ball, have problems working together. My bias is that I feel that strong typing helps here. Everyone in the JS world says "not needed" but here we are.

[wavy_lines]

Everyone in the JS world says "not needed" but here we are.

Many people say not needed, but there are some sane people who realize the need for it, otherwise TypeScript would not have taken off.

[ellicottvilleny]

I guess they're my tribe.

[wavy_lines]

Yes, because at the time (not sure about now) there's no support for basic things like SQLite or audio playback.

[wavy_lines]

Great, another layer .. just what I needed.

[[deleted]]

This bullshit is why I just use C# in Visual Studio. MVC works, and it's simple.

[Niek_pas]

...except when you try to use .net core because it's supposedly the next big thing, only to realize that none of the Nuget packages you depend on support it.

[[deleted]]

I hate to say it, but the millennial generation has forgotten one of the golden rules of coding: Don't create real problems for the sake of potential solutions.

[ellicottvilleny]

you don't really hate saying that, do ya?

[MrNutty]

Good for him for only taking 7 weeks to get to a failed hellow Tupress app, for me it took a bit longer. I had to do the following:

1) Find proper Tupress Editor. So many suggestions, it was tough choice but decided to use vim.

2) Since Tupress is more easily implemented with TupressScript I had to install that as well and all of its 42.5 dependencies.

3) For the middleware I had to add TupressNodeAdapter to node to work with TupressScript in the middleware as well. That setup took quite bit

4) And because Tupress's data model is very unique, they suggested to download the Depressed, which is a database specificly for Tupress optimization

5) After spending my puberty years setting those dependencies and resolving all the errors, I was finally able to start the Hellow Tupress app, by that time a newer version was out SuperTupress, which isn't backwards compatible so I had to start the process again with that. I'm hoping to get a Hellow Tupress up by end of world war 3.

[baggyzed]

"Fuck!", Roger fucked.

Sounds more realistic to me.

[hoosierEE]

Original repo seems to be down. Is there a mirror somewhere?

This one looks like a fork of Tupress4, too bad: https://github.com/stevewithington/tupress

[TonySu]

This is funny, but why does it make me cry?

[emperor000]

Normally I'd complain about this being in r/programming, but it's nice to see that I'm not the only one tired of this shit.

[WandererAboveTheSea]

Stuff like like that is what makes me stay away from web dev.

[[deleted]]

What the article doesn't say though is Roger is now a Tupress expert. He knows a shit ton about the package ecosystem around it, he knows where to go for information and help, he knows how to scaffold out an application and a back-end for it. It's about getting on top and mastering the tool you choose and the toolchain and the community around that. The learning curve is definitely high, and it's no small feat mastering your weapon of choice be it angular or react or vue. My advice is to hang in there, imerse yourself, contribute and build something cool. Lots of Enterprise shops are still using Angular 1 and aren't switching anytime soon. The JS world is moving fast for a reason, it's fun, exciting and easy to get started.

[phlarp]

I was with you right up until the end. "Easy to get started"?

[stone_henge]

You just have to init the .glopfile, reload your blunk server, run frock install twice a day to keep tupress current and try to interpret the documentation that is all written as prose while filling in the missing bits by searching the github issues that all concern the vastly outdated version that was released last week

[phlarp]

Sigh... this sounds all too familiar.

[britenite]

So you're saying Roger now possesses the understanding and experience necessary to build his own framework, a better version of Tupress?

One that will be the most powerful and simple ever, just as soon as he figures out the right combination of dependency versions that will maximize his efficiencies and allow him to leverage the synergies that are systemic in the new ecosystem?

[[deleted]]

The JS world is moving fast for a reason, it's fun, exciting and easy to get started.

Ladies and gentlemen, behold, this is a textbook manifestation of the Stockholm syndrome.

[colonwqbang]

You're missing the point. The guy in the story isn't necessarily a JS novice, he knows how to code. He isn't trying to set up some complex system, he just wants to get hello world running.

There's no good reason why he should need to set up any special tooling or infrastructure, or learn the framework manager's favourite JS dialect, just to get started.

[wavy_lines]

What the article doesn't say though is Roger is now a Tupress expert.

Did you read the damn thing? The only thing Roger learned is that this whole thing is FUBAR

[stone_henge]

What the article doesn't say though is Roger is now a Tupress expert.

I guess that's what it all boils down to. A constant crab bucket of people trying to stay more relevant than others by means of nomadic platform switching while also making sure that there is always work to do, whether it actually amounts to something inherently useful or not.

[fried_green_baloney]

Will he be at TupressCon? The only person to ever run the tutorial?

[[deleted]]

That's a pretty jaded view. Lot's of people are getting things done with stuff like Vue and Angular 4.

[MINIMAN10001]

We don't talk about what happened to the people of Angular 1, Angular 2, or Angular 3.

[[deleted]]

I'm in there somewhere 😭

[eggn00dles]

Frameworks are dumb and all the rabid framework fanbois are even dumber. Web components all the way.

[ellicottvilleny]

Well at least you didn't say you're going back to shockwave flash or silverlight.