Ask HN: Where is my server-side rendering?
6 by willvarfar | 10 comments on Hacker News.
So its been 20 years since I last did web-dev. My memory of the old days was that pretty much any programmer could go write server-side code in any scripting language to generate pages and tables and things and build UIs pretty much instantly. HTML was a language that was obvious and easy to generate with for-loops and such, and Javascript was something you could add for fancy things. Templates came along and made things even easier, and the biggest pain point was the back-button. Fast forward to 2021, and I am in need of a simple editor for a GRPC API and I am finding myself flummoxed and unsure where to start on how to even make a UI for it! Everything seems to one server that serves Javascript single-page app that uses graphql to interrogate some middleware that in turn calls whatever backends are needed etc. Where went the quick and dirty results of server-side generation of HTML tables and such? It feels like modern web-dev is more cogs and more massaging and a much steeper learning curve and everything. How can old-timers quickly and easily get a modern-feeling but simple-to-make UI?