by array_key_first | 2025-12-13 01:50:06+00:00
> No, the point of the API is to loosely couple the frontend and backend with a contract. The frontend doesn't need to model the backend, and the backend doesn't need to know what's happening on the frontend, it just needs to respect the API output. Changes/additions in the API are handled by API versioning, allowing overlap between old and new.

This is the idea, and idea which can never be fully realized.

The backend MUST understand what the frontend sees to some degree, because of efficiency, performance, and user-experience.

If we build the perfect RESTful API, where each object is an endpoint and their relationships are modeled by URLs, we have almost realized this vision. But it cost us our server catching on fire. It thrashed our user experience. Our application sucks ass, it's almost unusable. Things show up on the front-end but they're ghosts, everything takes forever to load, every button is a liar, and the quality of our application has reached new depths of hell.

And, we haven't realized the vision even. What about Authentication? User access? Routing?

> Not if the frontend isn't trying to model the internals of the backend.

The frontend does not get a choice, because the model is the model. When you go against the grain of the model and you say "everything is abstract", then you open yourself up to the worst bugs imaginable.

No - things are linked, things are coupled. When we just pretend they are not, we haven't done anything but obscure the points where failure can happen.

> Velocity increases because frontend works to a stable API, and backend doesn't need to co-ordinate changes that don't affect the API output. Also, changes involving both don't require simultaneous co-ordinated release: once the PM has approved a change, the backend implements, releases non-breaking API changes, and then frontend goes on its way.

No, this is a stark decrease in velocity.

When I need to display a new form that, say, coordinates 10 database tables in a complex way, I can just do that if the application is SSR or Livewire-type. I can just do that. I don't need the backend team to implement it in 3 months and then I make the form. I also don't need to wrangle together 15+ APIs and then recreate a database engine in JS to do it.

Realistically, those are your two options. Either you have a performant backend API interface full of one-off implementations, what we might consider spaghetti, or you have a "clean" RESTful API that falls apart as soon as you even try to go against the grain of the data model.

There are, of course, in-betweens. RPC is a great example. We don't model data, we model operations. Maybe we have a "generateForm" method on the backend and the frontend just uses this. You might notice this looks a lot like SSR with extra steps...

But this all assumes the form is generated and then done. What if the data is changing? Maybe it's not a form, maybe it's a node editor? SSR will fall apart here, and so will the clean-code frontend-backend. It will be so hellish, so evil, so convoluted.

Bearing in mind, this is something truly trivial for desktop applications to do. The models of modern web apps just cannot do this in a scalable, or reliable, way. But decades old technology like COM, dbus, and X can. We need to look at what the difference is and decide how we can utilize that.