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Traditional vs modern web development ⚔️

Sunny Singh on July 02, 2019

Modern web development. We all have a love and hate relationship with it because while it revolutionized web development practices, it also greatly...
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David Wickes

You appear to be confusing 'web development' with 'JavaScript development'.

Dear front end devs: it's not all about you.

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Kevin K. Johnson

It's tagged for "webdev" and "JavaScript". 🤷🏾‍♂️

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Drew Town

I really liked this post as a way to explain "modern" web development to "old-school" developers. The fact that it is nearly 2 years old now and has aged pretty well shows that web development has stabilized quite a bit in that time.

Personally, I think bundling is probably the most impressive thing about modern web development. No more making sure this script is minified and ordered correctly before that script. Webpack does an amazing job and doing all of that for us with a little setup effort (or none if you are using a CLI tool like Vue's). Plus the benefits of tree-shaking and async loading. Huge win!

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Sunny Singh

Nice, love the dinosaur comics! Yeah bundling is pretty impressive, I'm not sure how many people still prefer running concatenation and optimization scripts with Gulp/Grunt versus just having Webpack/Parcel handle all of that for you by just looking at imports, but I definitely prefer the latter.

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Ville M. Vainio

Heard of Angular?

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Martins

Managing packages - the web was never supposed to have a central repository like npm has become. It was supposed to be open and decentralized. I believe modern js package managers have hurt the web more than done it good.

Building UI - I totally agree with you here. Makes it MUCH easier and faster to develop real world projects.

Bundling & Transpiling - Oh, please!! This is the worst idea ever. 1) With HTTP/2.0 for most web apps there is no need for bundling at all. and 2) people just PLEASE stop transpiling your javascript! Soon javascript will become a mere machine language, a target language for our computers to run not for humans to read. That's a very very bad idea! We learned JS by looking at "View source" let's keep it that way.

I have been using the latest ES features in modern web dev without bundling or transpiling. Oh and the native ES5 import feature is amazing, you should try it. And if the user's browser doesn't support it, well put a message up there to download a newer version.

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Mark Giannelis

Reading many stories and publications in terns of traditional web dev many people are reporting that traditional web development is being phased out

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Mark Giannelis

Many people are actually starting to report that traditional web development is being
phased out

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Meghan (she/her)

Call me crazy but I still do the “old way” in almost every category. But I do use ES7+ and import, etc

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Sunny Singh • Edited

Not crazy at all haha, do whatever makes sense for you.

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Adam Crockett 🌀

Unrelated, love your website and ironMic looks great.

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Sunny Singh

Hey this means a lot, thanks Adam!

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evanotadev

You forgot classic asp :)