What are your opinions on the future of back-end web development? Is the Java ecosystem going to wither away as more modern and better solutions are emerging and maturing?
If so, which language/framework and/or programming paradigm do you think will become the new dominant player and how soon?
Personally I would love to see Rust becoming a new standard, it’s a pleasure to write and has a rapidly growing ecosystem, I don’t think it’s far away from overtaking Java. The biggest hurdle imo is big corporations taking a pretty big risk by choosing a relatively new language that’s harder to learn compared to what has been the standard for decades.
Playing it safe means you minimize surprises and have a very large amount of people that are already experts in the language.
Taking the risk will definitely improve a lot of things given that you find enough people that know or are willing to learn Rust, but it also means that you’re trading off Java flaws with Rust flaws. That’s the case however with every big change, and Java flaws are a good enough reason to make a big change.
I give typescript running a decent shot of being a major force in backend APIs. There’s a draw to being able to code the same language on front and backend. It’s got a stronger type system than Java in strict mode as well.
It also has quick boot time which can help in cloud functions that may eventually become the preferred method of APIs. No server or os to maintain and they are close to the customers location
Yeah, JavaScript/TS doesn’t get a great rep being used on the backend. But I use it on quite a few of my projects, one of which gets thousands of requests per minute. I was skeptical of whether or not using Node on the backend would hold up, but the performance has been stellar… pretty surprising, actually.
I really like TS and Python as a backend language but only for projects that are under 5k lines. As soon as it gets above that refactoring, reference counting and type safety falls off for TS imo.
I’m still a TS fanboy. You can do some crazy type acrobatics in it.
Thousands of requests per minute can mean many things so maybe you’re referring to several hundred requests per minute, but one of our services at work gets 300 requests/second which is ~18K requests per minute and it’s really not that much. We’re using pretty cheap cloud services. Even thrice the traffic is pretty much a slow walk for your average production-grade web framework.
Web frameworks are built to support an insane amount of incoming requests, including node. The issue with node is the single threading and having to scale with worker threads AFAIK.
edit: our runtime is C#
People always say this but its not technically correct and can be misleading.
Technically, JavaScript runs single threaded but not Node.js itself and certainly not when using it on the backend in something like Express. IO operations and other things tooling libraries do can cause you to run out of a thread pool. But Node.js, when handling requests, gives you much of the benefit of multithreading without having to deal with multithreaded code.
Aaaahh so libuv actually runs a thread pool, TIL. I’m another victim of internet propaganda I guess 😅 . You know, I never actually checked libuv docs until now and they seem quite welt built.
The silliest thing I’ve just realized is that I knew that the first implementation of a web server in dotnet core was using libuv, and I still didn’t think twice about the single threaded meme.
It doesn’t get a great rep? Would love to hear from that perspective. I’m only seeing the opposite.
Many popular node libraries are/have converted to Typescript. I was on the fence last year but now I’m working towards converting my work into Typescript too.
I think they meant JavaScript/TypeScript don’t get a great rap in comparison to others like Java, Rust, C#, etc.
I think everyone who works with JavaScript/TypeScript professionally will come to prefer TypeScript given a bit of time.