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?
React makes all of that easy to compose. I tell it how to render my state, and I write code that updates state.
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.