Maybe the answer was never in JS eating the entire frontend, and changing the tooling won’t make it better, as it’s always skirting what’s actually good for the web.
I used to agree but these days with Vite things are a lot smoother. To the point that I wouldn't want to work on UI without fine-grained hot reloads.
Even with auto reload in PHP, .NET, etc you will be wasting so much time. Especially if you're working on something that requires interaction with the page that you will be repeating over and over again.
Didn't everybody say the exact same thing about Node, React, jQuery...? There is always a new and shiny frontend JS solution that will make the web dev of old obsolete and everyone loves it because it's new and shiny, and then a fresh crop of devs graduates school, the new shiny solution is now old and boring, and like a developer with untreated ADHD, they set out to fix the situation with a new frontend framework, still written in JavaScript, that will solve it once and for all.
I still build websites now the same as I did when I graduated in 2013. PHP, SQL, and native, boring JavaScript where required. My web apps are snappy and responsive, no loading bars or never-ending-spinning emblems in sight. shrug
That’s honestly not that many things IRL. If you look at all the things you build only a minority actual demand high interactivity, or highly custom JS. Otherwise existing UI libraries cover the bulk of what people actually need to do on the internet (ie, not just whatever overly fancy original idea the designers think is needed for your special product idea).
It’s mostly just dropdowns and text and tables etc.
Once you try moving away from all of that and questioning if you need it at every step you’ll realize you really don’t.
It should be server driven web by default with a splattering of high functionality islands of JS. That’s what rails figured out after changing the frontend back and forth.
> Even with auto reload in PHP, .NET, etc you will be wasting so much time
Rails has a library that will refresh the page when files change without a full reload, using Turbo/Hotwire. Not quite HMR but it’s not massively different if your page isn’t a giant pile of JS, and loads quickly already.
What if you have a modal opened with some state?
Or a form filled with data?
Or some multi-selection in a list of items that triggers a menu of actions on those items?
Etc.
And it's true Vite can't always do HMR but it's still better than the alternative.
No -- but you could. And it wouldn't be the end of the world. So I'm just saying, DX doesn't eclipse all other considerations.
'Twas before my time. What was so great about it? I remember needing it installed for Netflix like 15 years ago. Did you ever work with Flash? How was that?
