We've hit the part of the cycle where the tooling is now a new prison to break free from.
I guess I'm getting old now??? That said, the JS build process is insane and due for an evolution.
I recently wanted a lil drag and drop web-based mood board. Drag pictures in, have functionality to move around screen.
I searched GitHub and found one that was almost perfect. Open source, so I went to go and make changes. 500MB of build dependencies later, I was troubleshooting deep in react build tooling to just get the dang page to render.
I ended up writing my own with about 200 lines of JS (if that).
Your "getting old now" implies to me that this is the first time in maybe 15 years. To my eye we've got this point every 3-4 years now.
I understand why people don't want to "just write JavaScript" but the JS community has a cultural problem with overestimating the benefits of some approach, but much moreso, utterly neglecting costs, to the point of yelling at people who want to talk about them. It is slowly and laboriously getting over that, but I see a long way to go still.
> Open source, so I went to go and make changes. 500MB of build dependencies later, I was troubleshooting deep in react build tooling to just get the dang page to render.
This happens on open source web projects where the lead maintainers want pull requests that are consistent with a given code style and feature set with docs someone else already wrote. Much easier to blame the underlying libraries and refuse the PR and let someone fork if they really want the feature that bad.
This isn't crazy to me. If you want to talk about cruft, web isn't even the worst.
The react universe is the absolute worst for this sort of thing. Honestly you should have just used a jQuery plugin. You'd be done in 1hr, with nary an npm install in sight.
Now that's a name I haven't heard in a while. Seriously though, it is amazing how long jQuery basically single-handedly supported the entire public facing internet. I know there was ASP and PHP/WP, but for non-cookie-cutter sites there was about 10-15 years where you could bank on jQuery as a dependency.
I kept waiting for "the next jQuery" but I guess it's never happening.
It really was (and still is, I guess) such a remarkable project. A unifying, simplifying thing that was so good it replaced 95% of the competition for a number of years.
Today... god. I realize that today's complex frontends are far from feasible in jQuery, and we could never have anything as simple as jQuery replacing them. But I'm not sure anybody actually likes what we wound up with.
I’d consider things like cheerio and alpine as the next iterations of jQuery.
Also Frontend tooling doesn’t have to be complicated, only if you let it be.
Using things like svelte or Htmx when appropriate are vastly easier than herding react or angular around.
Also things like Laravel, Rails, and Django are still massively productive web toolkits that handle nearly everything you need to do to launch projects people want to use.
Definitely check out HTMX! I do like Svelte myself but I don't like how it seems like the majority of development is spent on Sveltekit itself. That said, Svelte is in a great position and can easily pair with things like Go or C# or PHP. It really reminds me of a more thoughtful react in a new age after a decade of previous lessons.
As for HTMX, they published a great book that is available for free:
The book is well written IMO, it goes through the history of hypermedia and how to create a CRUD app with HTMX + Python (Flask). The backend portions are very simple where you can easily replace it with the language of your choice, it's also not hard to find some repos online that do this too.
I had a similar experience. I wanted to make a mindmap/flowchart for a very complex project. Well, almost all flowchart software is meant for organizations to use, so it's got a bunch of extraneous steps that would've gotten in my way. And all the mindmap software was huge and suffered from the same problems on top of having obtuse interfaces. I just wanted something where I could right click, make an ellipse, right click it to add text that would resize the ellipse instead of the other way around, repeat, and then drag between the two in order to make a line.
I gave up and made a conspiracy board on my wall with Post-It notes and some green yarn. The only downside is I only have access to it when in my house.
I guess I'm getting old now??? That said, the JS build process is insane and due for an evolution.
I recently wanted a lil drag and drop web-based mood board. Drag pictures in, have functionality to move around screen.
I searched GitHub and found one that was almost perfect. Open source, so I went to go and make changes. 500MB of build dependencies later, I was troubleshooting deep in react build tooling to just get the dang page to render.
I ended up writing my own with about 200 lines of JS (if that).