Is web development as much of a clusterfuck as it appears to be?

>>58351321
depends, but mostly yeh
rest apis are a godsend tho

Yes

Nobody knows what the fuck they're doing and just outsources their shit to chinks and pajeets in exchange for cheap spaghetti code

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>>58351321
Oh my, yes.

Even simplified down, web development usually requires using at least 5 different languages at once. This part is actually fine, two of them aren't even programming languages. (CSS and HTML)

The complexity comes from essentially writing a long-running multi-user graphical program that gets input primarily in the form of text over a socket which can track individual users, even if their IP changes, and perform some actually-useful function for them. They do this by spitting out the right type of text and binary blobs that can be rendered on a device of unknown size and capability, and function according to the thing the user wants to do. To top it off, the program must also maintain its state between runs, and often must be able to talk to other versions of the same program on other computers in order to not die under heavy load.

In order to manage this, these things are broken down into smaller problems, some which are often handled because they are really hard otherwise:
>The socket and session management part of the program are often already written as web servers, standalone or not
>The program state is maintained by a database almost exclusively
>The coordination of the network is often handled by reverse proxies and load balancers

After that, there is knowledge of how web browsers work, how the servers work, how databases work, and how they all talk to each other, even though there might be any number of any of them.

The logic that makes all the parts talk to each other is sometimes handled by web frameworks and other abstractions, but many will write these from scratch.

I think writing your own CMS for no real reason is like a rite of passage for a web developer.

REST is the only really consistent and reliable thing in web development (aside from languages themselves). It's a solid means of understanding an unfamiliar system because it's all standardized (for the most part).

Writing APIs tends to suck though

When you use Webpack, aliases, loaders, Babel, load CSS and render HTML in JavaScript just to build your shitty one page app in a >2MB is file, yes it's unnecessary complicated.

Backend using REST is pretty comfy.

rest okay to me
webcunts now have standard shit
but slow as fuck

Can someone explain to me what REST is? I know how to google I just want to read explanations from you anons.

As far as I can tell its using JSON and using the GET/POST/DELETE thing's. To communicate with the server. I don't know any other way of doing it desu, what did people do before REST?

>>58353596
You can think of REST as a URL convention. The idea is that your API exposes resources, and these resources can be interacted with using HTTP verbs.

Let's say you have the following URL:
mysite.com/api/people

People is the resource.

If you send HTTP GET to it, you will get back a list of all people.

If you want to get only a specific person, you can send an HTTP GET request, but adding the id of the person to the URL as such:
mysite.com/api/people(5)

If you want to update this person, you send an HTTP UPDATE to the same URL, but adding to it a JSON (or XML or whatever, REST doesn't imply JSON) body that contains the updated data.

If you want to add a new person, you can send HTTP POST with a body. To delete a person, HTTP DELETE.

Make sense?

>>58353671
Forgot to answer your last question

What people did before? Well, just regular methods... It's still done today. REST is in no way the only way to do API's! In fact it's probably horribly bad in some cases where you want to complete control what the clients can do.

Modifying my previous example, you would instead of a People resource, get the following:

mysite.com/api/AddPerson
mysite.com/api/UpdatePerson
mysite.com/api/DeletePerson
mysite.com/api/GetPerson

OP: Yes, web dev is a clusterfuck today. Some of my worst development experiences are web related.

>webdev
>RESTful

Fags thinking there's much overlap between these two are wrong.

Webdev is more clearly thought of as user facing. Restful is more clearly thought of as backend facing. A webdev very needs to know how to interact with the restful api but that's it: the driver needs to know how to interact with a steering wheel and the gas/brakes.

Designing a backend with a restful layer is for proper programmers. Doing webdev is for karleykoders

>>58353671
Thank you anon that was a fantastic explanation!

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>>58353596
>be on /g/
>not knowing what REST is

>>58351321
I want to make a web game like Tribal Wars. Thinking of doing it in node.js, is this a good idea or should I go with something else?

>>58351321
Full stack web developer here.

Yes, it's fucked up beyond any repair.

Stick to the back end and it's fine. Leave the HTML and JavaScript to the poos

>>58354292
Relax. Some of us don't code much. I come here for the guts thread.

>rest
now web development is now easier than ever
you dont have to learn anything backend anymore

>>58354826
Backend is the only iteresting thing in web development. 99% of """web devs""" today can't design a properly normalized relational database (let alone load balance it), have no clue how HTTP works (never read any RFC in their lives) and if they do any backend work, they're completely lost without their favorite framework that hides everything behind 70 abstraction layers so that serving a "hello world" page takes 600 miliseconds. I'm ashamed to admit to people I do web development because they think I'm an incompenent javascript monkey faggot from /wdg/.

>>58351321
node + rest + json + angular front end

leave the HTML and CSS to a front end monkey

and done, all JS ezpz

>>58351321

>Is web development as much of a clusterfuck as it appears to be?

What? No, no..
IT'S MUCH WORSE !1!!


>>58351705

Pretty good comment!
I agree with most things. But..

>writing your own CMS for no real reason is like a rite of passage for a web developer

This really depends on the language.

Writing a simple TCP/IP Socket in C (of course with your own package protocol) and some basic functionality is pretty hard and nobody I know could do without looking up some things.

Writing a complete Server with cool functionality in Go, Python or Ruby is a breeze.

PHP is somewhat a middle ground, a simple LAMP server isn't that hard, but you can fuck things up more easily.


>>58355048

Don't underestimate JavaScript. It'Ss pretty hard to find skilled JS developers. Every web guy has some JS basics up his sleeve, but to write actual good JS code is another story. If you are a wizzard in stuff like D3, companies will throw good mony at you (if you have some skills in design).

>>58355406

>unironically recommending angular

ftfy

>>58354061
and yet a backend developer is still called a webdev

>>58355501
okay then react or whatever fotm framework you choose

>>58354690
kys

>>58355520

By those who don't think clearly particularly human resources and socjus types

>>58351321
UI is and a lot of old web tech like php is needlessly convoluted.

if you arent autistic about speed its ezpz

>>58353671
Why should anybody allow to manipulate your resources? Don't companies usually pay money to prevent getting hacked?

>>58357875
You add authorisation

>>58355687

What about Vanilla.js?

>>58357875

Actual restful backend programmer here.

RESTful is exceptionally tractable with standard security models. My fave is to use RBAC - every user gets zero, one or more roles, every URL gets zero, one or more access controls making it very easy to secure who may do what.

The source for a properly designed backend is also tractable to security: different programmers can be very solidly confined to writing code for particular URLs or verbs thereof to the point where the skeleton code for supporting the server can be entirely hidden from shitty programmer's view.