Don’t Build a General Purpose API to Power Your Own Front End (2021)

Re:Don’t Build a General Purpose API to Power Your Own Front... by oceanplexian on Sunday August 20, 2023 @12:07PM (#37200444)

I’m a systems engineer and SPA’s are a superior architecture to deal with from a delivery POV. It is very difficult to cache a dynamic web app with a CDN. There are ways, like SSI, managing variants, Purging, and so on, but a huge pain. And if you don’t have a sophisticated CDN and are using something like Cloudfront, forget about all those fancy features.

SPA? I can serve the whole thing with static files and remove 90% of the traffic from my web server. The API can be served from a different path from the static files. API requests are super tiny and more tolerant to fluctuating network conditions, and you can hide a lot of that with Javascript.

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Re:Don’t Build a General Purpose API to Power Your Own Front... by TheCleric on Sunday August 20, 2023 @12:36PM (#37200689)

Exactly. Even non-SPA frameworks (such as NextJS with static builds) mean you can compile all of your frontend code to S3 (where it's a negligible cost) and only pay for the API instances.

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Re:Don’t Build a General Purpose API to Power Your Own Front... by ThatPlayer on Sunday August 20, 2023 @06:30PM (#37203547)

I have a hobby project that's very static: a website for viewing webscraped snippets of writing from another site. I hosted it on Github Pages. I didn't want to use a static site generator which would've generated easily 10,000 files and with all the duplicated code would have put me above GitHub's 1GB limit for Github Pages. Similarly Cloudflare Pages has a 20,000 file limit.

So instead I combined it into various JSON files. Now I have a SPA downloading the JSON as necessary, and don't need any API/backend/database. I'm considering moving to sqlite now there are official WASM builds.

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