this post was submitted on 26 Apr 2024
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You still have to consider ACID vs BASE when choosing a database software/provider. It comes from CAP theorem.
If that's how people want to talk about it they can, but you can't eliminate statefulness from the whole stack.
Again. the goal is not to eliminate the statefullness of the whole stack. That's just the straw man you keep arguing against. The goal is to remove context from the server. Once you get a bit more experience under your belt, you'll understand why that's useful.
The whole conversation was about backend being similar because you can write a stateless server. Have you forgotten? The issue here is a backend isn't just one service, you can write a stateless service but you are in fact just moving the statefulness to the database server. The whole backend isn't simpler than the front-end for that reason. It might be simpler for other reasons, though many popular websites need complex backends.
I am not arguing that a stateless service isn't a useful concept. I get why people might want that. That's not what this conversation is about. It's about the backend vs frontend. Backend to me includes databases and other support services.
No, I have not forgotten. This whole conversation was me explaining to you the advantages of keeping the session context on the client. You are not moving statefulness to the database. The fact that you keep repeating this clearly demonstrates that you don't understand what you're talking about.
The statefulness lives on the client. Everything I said about the backend application also applies to the database itself. Any node in the db can pick up the work and store the value. The issue being solved is having everything tied to the state in a particular user session.
To explain it to you in a different way. There will be a certain amount of data that will need to be persisted regardless of the architecture. However, moving user state to the client means that the backend doesn't have to worry about this. The fact that you're having trouble grasping this really is incredible.
I don't write web applications for a living and I especially don't write front ends. I do have to ask though:
What information are you actually keeping in the front end or web server? Surely you don't need any ephemeral state that isn't already stored in the browser and/or for you like the URL or form details. Only thing I can think of is the session ID, and that's normally a server side thing.
I mean I've written web sites where there is no JavaScript at all, and the server is stateless or close to it. It's not a difficult thing to do even. All the actual information is in the database, the web server fetches it, embedds it into a HTML template, and sends it to the client. Client doesn't store anything and neither does the server. Unless I really don't understand what you mean by state. You might keep some of your server fetches data from another server using REST or SOAP but that's only used once as well.
Well, I've been writing web apps for a living for the past 20 years or so, and I've written lots of full stack apps. There can be plenty of ephemeral state in a non-trivial UI. For example, I worked on a discharge summary app for a hospital at one time. The app had to aggregate data, such as patient demographics, medications, allergies, and so on from a bunch of different services. This data would need to be pulled gradually based on what the user was doing. All of the data that got pulled and entered by the user would represent the session state for the workflow. Maybe don't trivialize something you admit having no experience with.
So you do include ephemeral state that's a copy of database data? If we were including that then every non-static website has plenty of state, but so does every web server. Whatever definition you are using must be quite odd.
I don't know why you have so much difficulty wrapping your head around the concept of UI state to be honest.