> The front-end is just 1-10% of any serious system and yet, in the JS world, it takes 90% of the time building it and maintaining it. It just doesn't add up.
Wow, I want you to come work for me for a week. The front end is what interfaces with the user - your client - the one whom is paying money. You may hate JS, but it is the tool that we use to build interaction.
You misunderstood or I didn't express myself correctly.
I don't want to underplay the importance of the front-end, or in general the interfaces
and what that means for bringing value to a product.
But however you spin it it's not the core technology. You could make the same point
you made, by saying the same about the marketing/sales department. Yes, it's how you
bring customers and without it you'll probably fail to reach a large audience. But
again, it's not the core of your product.
Also keep in mind that mobile platforms(which are quickly becoming much more important
than the web) also have a user interface. Take a guess at which of the 2(web/mobiles) are
more costly to develop and maintain. The web, by far. That can't happen for much longer,
that's all that I'm saying.
That depends very much on what type of product you're building. I work on two "serious" enterprise products using Angular, and for one of them the "core technology" is evenly split between the Java backend and the Angular application, while for the other the Angular application is clearly the "core technology."
Indeed. I work in a similar kind of product. I was talking about the
majority of cases though. There are even cases where the mobile app is
the core and only technology.
Now what would be interesting questions though are:
1) How many people work in the backend and how many work in each
of the respective front-ends.
2) Suppose that you had 2 front-end interfaces, angular(for the web) and
an android app(it could be an iPhone app, it doesn't matter). How
many backend devs would need to know or actively interact with the
angular front-end and how many would need to interact with the android
app.
In my case, none of the backend people(a lot) need to interact with the mobile
codebase(2-people team for every mobile type), while all of us need to
help or interact with the web front-end.
I see similar scenarios with most of the companies I interact or know about.
The mobile team is almost always autonomous and can accomplish a lot
with just a few people. While hords of people are thrown into the web frontend,
even if it's not their primary specialty. Hence the need for fullstack
developers. Why? Because the JS ecosystem sucks and we still don't have a
real integrated solution. I hope that this will change, preferably before
I retire.
Stop trying to shoehorn your backend into your web frontend, and treat the web frontend like the mobile one. That means, one single HTTP API to access the backend for both. I bet you already have this for your mobile app.
More often than not, the web frontend ends up being client side HTML/JS and some sort of intermediate middle-end server that hosts that HTML/JS. That way it turns into a fullstack app that does some processing on the middle-end to pass it on to the front-end JS.
You can make the frontend 100% static HTML/JS (and serveable off any static file CDN), so all you have to worry about is the API between them.
Wow, I want you to come work for me for a week. The front end is what interfaces with the user - your client - the one whom is paying money. You may hate JS, but it is the tool that we use to build interaction.