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Frontend / Backend are meaningless words.
The concept never applied "fully"
It's a messy and error prone definition, most likely coming out of either an theoretical-academic or "pseudo scientific" (e.g. HR ;) ) ... Not knowing that for sure, but I always wanted to get that off my chest.
When you try to put together a system, the Frontend will always have a relation with the Backend - even in a static site, that is e.g. pregenerated, you'll have some backend relation. Your webserver needs to deliver the (cached) content and if you don't think about this part _at all_ it won't work.
What's worse is that this crappy definition has become an excuse for exactly that.
Mimimimi this is not my job... Whiney sobbing bitches breaking out in hysterical outrage cause they have to do a bit more work and could smear their beautiful mind with some "backend".
While I think that a lot of knowledge concerning separations of concerns, be it layered design as you described it, is valuable - you cannot split frontend or backend.
You can put a wedge between the layers of - let's simplify - outputting and presenting data vs fetching data by separating them, but you can't see them as two different things that have nothing in common.
As u might guess by now I hate the term frontend and backend...
JSON is data. It can be used to store data. For what it is used is entirely up to the developer.
And I don't give a fuck what the developer calls himself as long as he deals with the data and it's representation in a sane, documented way everyone understands.
This whole frontend / backend thing prevents that more often than I like.
You wanna be a jack of all trades? Do it.
You wanna be a CSS master? Do it.
Be whatever you want...
But please, don't put yourself in a tiny shoebox pretending it's the only thing you can do. IT and development is intermediary - you hurt yourself in the long run and piss off a lot of people y doing so. -
@IntrusionCM Of course, someone who is a computer scientist has all-round knowledge, not just front-end. Though, I don't take away that I prefer staying in the web layer of things, prettifying things and I prefer to stay away from all the logic stuff. I'm more of an artist than a coder.
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@CaptainRant and that's fine. But that's exactly my trouble with the term frontend.
For me, it sounds like you would be the kind of guy I'd call for design, UX/UI, second opinions, reviewing, iconography, coding if you like it / feel up to it...
And the last line is important to me from a manager point. Just because it sounds like frontend, doesn't mean you are frontend. ;)
I'll try to never force someone do something he doesn't like - unless we can agree that we all have to do sometimes thing we don't like I'm fine with it..
The term frontend or backend has become so misused that it's for me like a taboo word.
People either use it to excuse them for not doing stuff they're perfectly able to do
.. or it's used in a context of HR to give someone a job he never wanted.
It's just negative to me. -
@IntrusionCM Lmfao I hate that HR abuse.. just to fill positions. Sometimes I get ads for "warehouse worker" and I'm like: "Wtf, that's manual labor. I'm a developer". I should configure some preferences lol.
In reply to:
https://devrant.com/rants/3957914/...
Okay, we must first establish common ground here. What do we understand about "showing"? I understand you probably mean displaying/rendering, more abstractly: "obtaining". Good, now we move on.
What's the point of a front-end? Well, in the 90's that used to be an easy answer: to share information (not even in a user-friendly way, per se). Web 2.0 comes, interaction with the website. Uh-oh, suddenly we have to start minding the user. Web 3.0 comes, ouch, now the front-end is a mini-backend. Even tougher, more leaks etc. The ARPAnet was a solution, a front-end that they had built in order to facilitate research document-sharing between universities. Later, it became the inter(national) net(work).
First there was SGML to structure the data (it's a way of making it 'pretty' in a lexicographical way) and turn it into information (which is what information is: data with added semantics) and later there was HTML to structure it even further, yet we all know that its function was not prettification, but rather structure. Later came CSS, to make it pretty. With its growing popularity, the web started to be used as a publishing device.
source:
https://w3.org/Style/CSS20/...
If we are to solely display JSON data in a pretty way, we may be limiting ourselves to the scenario of rendering pretty web pages using aesthetic languages such as CSS. We must also understand that if we are only focusing on making a website pretty with little to moderate functionality, we aren't really winning. A good website has to be a winner in all aspects, which is why frameworks came into existence, but.. lmao, let's leave that to another discussion.
Now let me recall back my college days.. front-end.. front-end.. heck, even a headset can be a front-end to a pick-order backend. We must think back to the essence, to the abstract. All other things are just implementations of it (yes, the horrendous thousands of Javascript libraries, lol).
So, my college notes say:
"Presentation layer: this is the UI.
In this layer you ask the middle tier for information, which gets that information from a database, which then goes back to middle tier, back to presentation. In the case of the headset, the operators can confirm an order is ready. This is essentially the presentation tier again: you're getting information from the middle tier and 'presenting it' as it were.
The presentation layer is in essence the question: how do I bring my application data to my end users in a platform-and solution-independent way?"
What's JSON? A way to transport data between the middle tier and the presentation tier. Is that what frontend development is? Displaying it in a pretty way? I don't think it is, because 'pretty' is an extra feature of obtaining and displaying data. Do we always have to display data in a pretty way? Not necessarily. We could write a front-end script (in NodeJS perhaps) that periodically fetches certain information from a middle-tier is serves a more functional role rather than a rendering one.
The prettification of data was a historical consequence of the popularity of the web (which is a front-end) (see second paragraph with link). Since the essence of a front-end is to obtain information from the back-end (with stress on obtaining), its presentation is not necessarily a defining characteristic of it, but rather an optional and solution-dependent aspect, a facet.
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