I've wondered if going back to that paradigm would be more productive or not than using React et al.
Plenty of big sites like Amazon or Steam still are made this way. Not exactly PHP + jQuery but rendering HTML on the server and sprinkling some JS on top of it.
Has anyone gone back to working like that?
Working with react has a higher barrier of entry (something which is becoming less true over time given that many templates etc exist for it), but if you want to be producing pages and functionality, a good react dev will run leagues around even an a exceptionally good jquery dev.
I’m solid at both and we are talking a dev cycle that is magnitudes faster once you are set up reasonably well. There’s a reason it’s popular. Typescript makes a lot of testing unnecessary and gives many guarantees on robustness. React makes it a breeze to create complex state full components. Nextjs makes it super easy to deploy all this to a web app and quickly create new pages.
It probably depends on the use case, no?
If you only need links, forms, and data tables what advantage does React have over SSR + jQuery?
The maintenance demands for using a heavy, evolving framework and a large graph of churning dependencies are tremendous and perpetual. While you can make meaningful wins on delivery time for a new feature, once "you are set up reasonably well", you've impliclty introduced new costs that don't apply to "vanilla" code that stays closer to established standards and only includes code it actually uses.
That's not to argue that vanilla is strictly better (both have a place), but just to acknowledge a latent but significant tradeoff that your comment seems to ignore.
Reusable components that can be tested in isolation. Type support. That leads to easier evolution and refactoring.
With good architecture you can go mobile with react-native.
Absolutely. This the reason I'm moving on from JS in the backend. You're constantly stitching up dependencies which might be abandoned and/or become incompatible at any moment.
React makes all of that easy to compose. I tell it how to render my state, and I write code that updates state.
Counterpoint: If you replace a frontend framework with backend components, as has been suggested a few times in this thread, those frameworks are even larger, and a lot of the basic functionality provided by React (such as components) is often provided by third-party packages.
Sure, if you're using something like jQuery, then it's smaller and more stable, but the functionality is limited compared to both backend and frontend frameworks. Which of course might be 100% appropriate depending on the use case.
Is putting in a couple of lines of JS that has no knowledge of the backend-managed good enough for small one-off pages? Maybe. But it's definitely not composable and abstractable, which was the original claim.
Or if the forms have to sync with the backend then there are other React-less options, for example:
Some forms are simple enough that you don't need composition and abstraction, yes, no-one's denying that.
> Or if the forms have to sync with the backend then there are other React-less options, for example:
> https://htmx.org/examples/value-select/
Ok, now try composing that. What happens when you want to nest one of those inside another (i.e. have 3 levels of selection)?
Here's the most dynamic form I can think of: https://www.globalgolf.com/golf-clubs/1064148-titleist-tsr2-...
Any input change triggers any/all other inputs to change.
Looks like they send the entire page each action, no React, yet the user experience is much better than the typical competitor site where they've overengineered the whole front end.
Their faceted search is nice too: https://www.globalgolf.com/golf-clubs/used/titleist/fairway-...
Notice how when you add a filter it updates the URL. Breath of fresh air.
And this is way beyond what I had in mind when I read links, forms, and data tables.
This stubbornly stupid mindset is why we have wars.
Edit: I checked the site myself and was able to reproduce the issue mentioned in GP. This is a terrible website.
I really don't think the argument for or against React has been settled.
GP focused their mic drop on my example rather than the larger conversation, which missed the point. You're doing the same thing now.
Feel free to add something to the conversation.