This is a very good article and I agree with most of it. I never really understood why React and Angular became big for the general web. They have a lot of usage in enterprise applications, where you typically access them from a “pc”, but even then they suck on the tablets your employees drive around with. At least for the most part they don’t suck that much worse than the terrible native clients that came before (and still do in the rare case that a supplier actually build a native mobile app). Why that spread to the wider web is beyond me though. I get why you would use it for personal projects if it’s your day time job anyway, but a page reload never hurt anyone.
I personally think that the most responsible “father” is finance. The article states that there is more money with the web, but in my experience it’s far easier to lock down payments through apps. I agree that part of this is because native apps are better on mobile, but they are also much easier to work with and consume. It’s not easy to make payments function well on the web while in a native app it’s just a click with well powered api behind it. Serving both users and developers. Now, it probably could be easier on the web, but who would deliver it? The article calls out Apple and to some degree Google as guilty of not making browsers competitive with mobile apps, but why would they? If anything it’s in their best interest to keep the web shitty on mobile.
I never really understood why React and Angular became big for the general web.
As opposed to what? Server side rendered pages with random jquery snippets sprinkled around for interactivity? I prefer the reactive model far more than manually trying to update the page myself.
Apparently SSR is quite hot in JS frameworks, after a new generation rediscovered how we oldies do Web development in .NET, Java, Ruby, Python, Go, PHP....
You could just do page reloads. Of course if you don’t really need very advanced authentication with role-based access control there is also HTMX which is around 10kb.
They became big because those companies paid for tech evangelism. People got excited and adopted, which in turn created more evangelists (unpaid) for those frameworks.
Compare them to HTMX that only has unpaid evangelists, each time it is brought up on HN, people compare it to React because of the strong base around React, creates a lens of how people see the world. Even though HTMX is a completely different framework with different intents.
Comments
This is a very good article and I agree with most of it. I never really understood why React and Angular became big for the general web. They have a lot of usage in enterprise applications, where you typically access them from a “pc”, but even then they suck on the tablets your employees drive around with. At least for the most part they don’t suck that much worse than the terrible native clients that came before (and still do in the rare case that a supplier actually build a native mobile app). Why that spread to the wider web is beyond me though. I get why you would use it for personal projects if it’s your day time job anyway, but a page reload never hurt anyone.
I personally think that the most responsible “father” is finance. The article states that there is more money with the web, but in my experience it’s far easier to lock down payments through apps. I agree that part of this is because native apps are better on mobile, but they are also much easier to work with and consume. It’s not easy to make payments function well on the web while in a native app it’s just a click with well powered api behind it. Serving both users and developers. Now, it probably could be easier on the web, but who would deliver it? The article calls out Apple and to some degree Google as guilty of not making browsers competitive with mobile apps, but why would they? If anything it’s in their best interest to keep the web shitty on mobile.
As opposed to what? Server side rendered pages with random jquery snippets sprinkled around for interactivity? I prefer the reactive model far more than manually trying to update the page myself.
Apparently SSR is quite hot in JS frameworks, after a new generation rediscovered how we oldies do Web development in .NET, Java, Ruby, Python, Go, PHP....
That's not what is happening. An old generation is profiting by selling to the new generation that don't know .NET, Java, Ruby, Python, Go, PHP.
Mainly Vercel after they took over React.
You could just do page reloads. Of course if you don’t really need very advanced authentication with role-based access control there is also HTMX which is around 10kb.
They became big because those companies paid for tech evangelism. People got excited and adopted, which in turn created more evangelists (unpaid) for those frameworks.
Compare them to HTMX that only has unpaid evangelists, each time it is brought up on HN, people compare it to React because of the strong base around React, creates a lens of how people see the world. Even though HTMX is a completely different framework with different intents.