I fail to see the point in SPA apps for the majority of web apps. At my work we have an ancient Dojo frontend and a newer react one being build. Its a few list views that the user can filter and a few forms with validation. It's a ridiculous amount of complexity to avoid loading a page. I could do almost everything for half the effort with server side HTML from Django and a little bit of JQuery.
I ask at my work why we are doing this and no one seems able to give me a decent answer but we carry on down this path regardless.
I work on regular ol' websites, that have some pages containing some moderate interactivity – so a few years ago the project adopted React to handle the frontend. I've found the experience mostly OK, but I sometimes get the urge to simplify things by leaning more on server-rendering / maybe using the URL to capture state...
and then realize I can't, and that this is Just The Way It Is Now. Because now all our devs expect to use React (or more accurately, its vast ecosystem of 3rd party functions of varying quality) to accomplish anything, and we forgot to screen for hires who can write their own JS+HTML or who understand how the response/request process works in a web application. (oops!)
"React hires are easy to hire for" so that often drives decisions, but I am skeptical my project ever needed React (or any hyper-optimized-for-SPAs-feature).
It just makes adding simple stuff so slow. Instead of a query, and and HTML template, you have a query built on top a shambles of a system that outputs JSON, passes it to another monstrosity that is our Dojo frontend. I have tried to create some static pages, but everything is so baked in to the mess we have, getting around the login is a major obstacle.
You should try again and reconsider if your team truly doesn't have an answer.
Most everyone using React should be using Nextjs or similar level of frameworks. Server rendering comes out of the box. On the other hand, it really isn't too complex anymore. With Next, Sveltekit, Remix, Nuxt, and friends, you get simple, hardened tooling out of the box. And you've decoupled frontend from api which many teams find very helpful to split responsibilities and allow certain features to move at different paces.
> Does anyone do server side rendering these days?
Yes, in React, with Next.js.
I'm going to have to dynamically create html and attach event handlers based on data either way. Much rather do it all in Typescript than remember Django templates DSL and still do javascript, for the result of worse UI's, poor 3p library support, and awful state management between frontend and backend.
Django temples are pretty simple. They are basically HTML with a a few constructs that you can put variables or loops in. Way simpler than React and Typescript.
thinking of forms as a model that can be rendered is really valuable IMO. most UXes would be 10x easier to write if we had better standardization around the 'schema to UX' step
'form first UX' would also reduce the work of building cross-platform apps
guessing django is ramping up on its AJAX, but I think a real forms standard would need to understand AJAX -- users aren't going to remember to scroll down to a 'save' button. realtime validation also an AJAX issue, typeahead as well.
Yes, we are trying to move over to FastAPI, which looks reasonable, but I struggle with the fact that there is no one source of truth for models.
Is there anywhere good to find out what I have been missing out on having not kept up to date with Djano for the last few years? I really miss using it and am looking for a job using it again.
I'm on fastapi with my current project -- I love the powerful type support for interfaces.
I'm using tortoise as my ORM; it feels like sqlmodels is worth exploring as an alternative -- sqlmodels is designed to integrate well with pydantic (so you DRY in messages) and with sqlalchemy (so you get their migration support).
I'm not sure if there's a fastapi / pydantic tool for generating form UX, but it might be doable to write one if not. (though styling could be tricky).
I notice myself still spending a lot of time writing basic CRUD routes. I don't know if this is a tools issue or just unavoidable.
I'm open to a tool like postgraphile to automate API on top of a DB schema, but I'm worried about the loss of control over messages, RBAC, and query design. I wish there were a python tool for mostly-declarative API route stubs -- would be simple to customize, and the purely-declarative routes could be shipped off to a postgraphile-like tool in the future.
I wish fastapi had better auth built in, but then again I wish this about django too -- I feel like I'm endlessly shopping for a third-party user auth server and haven't found it yet. Auth + admin were a huge investment at the beginning of my project, and in retrospect feels wasted.
I fail to see the point in SPA apps for the majority of web apps. At my work we have an ancient Dojo frontend and a newer react one being build. Its a few list views that the user can filter and a few forms with validation. It's a ridiculous amount of complexity to avoid loading a page. I could do almost everything for half the effort with server side HTML from Django and a little bit of JQuery.
I ask at my work why we are doing this and no one seems able to give me a decent answer but we carry on down this path regardless.