Re: Front-end Driven Applications

On 10/1/2014 5:47 PM, John Yeung wrote:

On Wed, Oct 1, 2014 at 4:46 PM, Buck Calabro <kc2hiz@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

The way I read it, there are so many back-end APIs that you
could basically script your front-end to be the glue that ties all those
APIs together.

I think the article tried to emphasize "front-end first", meaning that
as much of the application is developed on the client side (which, for
the purposes of the article, seemed to be synonymous with "Web
browser") as possible. It's not so much that this "new" paradigm is
about gluing APIs together as it is about being decoupled from the
back end. I think that for a significant portion of applications, the
back end really consists of a database and nothing else.

Nicely said.

If you wanted a dashboard for your executive types,
you'd call
get_stock_ticker('IBM')
get_weather('Rochester, MN')
get_customer_count('Northeast')

...and so on. Some of those APIs would be public (weather.gov,
nyse.com) and some would be built by your own company.

If you're in a position to be building APIs, then for the purposes of
the article, I think you count as a back-end developer.

This is my own bias on exhibit. We have a web development group (front
end, yeah?) and they do their UI / UX thing completely independent of
the database. When they need something, I write them a stored
procedure. We cooperate on the interface, but I don't know how it will
look when they're done, and they don't care how normalised (or not) the
stuff is in the database.

--buck