a server with the REST API on the same host does not change anything to my explanations...
I'll repeat myself: I used this architecture as an example as it is the most common architecture nowadays and it was easier to explain the concepts this way.
"I feel like in your effort to simplify the explanation of these different things you've actually added more complexity" : That's your point of view.
I like to keep things simple, and have never cared for the artificial split between frontend/backend/full-stack for that matter.
I don't agree that the split is artificial at all. It's actually eminently practical to decorrelate presentation from data.
While you're perfectly accurate when you point out that 'old-style' SSR (i.e. Rails, etc.) doesn't necessarily follow the API pattern and pulls data straight from data sources (esp. databases), it's not a pattern I would recommend nowadays, where you might have multiple frontend data 'consumers' (website(s), phone apps, desktop apps, other APIs) for a single data 'provider' (your API, which is really a data aggregator, as you might be pulling data from a variety of sources).
With a monolithic design pattern, you would have to replicate the backend side for each consumer frontend. Admittedly, you could engineer your monolithic design to return, say, JSON as well as HTML and thus turn it into an API in addition to being a website, but that muddles up the whole idea of separation of concerns between data and presentation, which is the opposite of "keeping things simple" as you put it.
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I think that you're misunderstanding here...
I'll repeat myself: I used this architecture as an example as it is the most common architecture nowadays and it was easier to explain the concepts this way.
"I feel like in your effort to simplify the explanation of these different things you've actually added more complexity" : That's your point of view.
Reacting on something fluffy said:
I don't agree that the split is artificial at all. It's actually eminently practical to decorrelate presentation from data.
While you're perfectly accurate when you point out that 'old-style' SSR (i.e. Rails, etc.) doesn't necessarily follow the API pattern and pulls data straight from data sources (esp. databases), it's not a pattern I would recommend nowadays, where you might have multiple frontend data 'consumers' (website(s), phone apps, desktop apps, other APIs) for a single data 'provider' (your API, which is really a data aggregator, as you might be pulling data from a variety of sources).
With a monolithic design pattern, you would have to replicate the backend side for each consumer frontend. Admittedly, you could engineer your monolithic design to return, say, JSON as well as HTML and thus turn it into an API in addition to being a website, but that muddles up the whole idea of separation of concerns between data and presentation, which is the opposite of "keeping things simple" as you put it.