Re:Ask HN: Is it worth a back-end developer's time to get in...
by mechanical_fish on Sunday January 25, 2009 @02:45PM
(#449419)
Amen.
The right approach is to understand /why/ it's hard from the front-end so you can make your back-end more suitable to the front.
I still don't know how to answer when people ask if I am a front-end or a back-end developer. I just don't get it. I used to think I could claim to be a back-end guy because I do know SQL, but I don't know how to make pretty mockups in Photoshop. But now it's apparent that knowing HTML and CSS and JS makes me a "front-end" developer in many people's eyes, so I've gone back to not knowing how to answer. It's like asking whether I walk primarily with my right leg or my left.
I think the dichotomy broke completely when Ajax came on the scene. In earlier times it was possible to pretend that the division between client-side code and server-side code was aligned with the division between the presentation layer and the logic and persistence layers of your app. That alignment was never very clean (there are limits to what you can rearrange with CSS alone, and while JS can theoretically rearrange everything the result is liable to be slow and fragile and terrifying to behold, and obviously the needs of the interface designer need to drive the optimization of the back-end data store, etc.), but you could still pretend. The ever-increasing role of client-side JS makes that view of the world less tenable. Now some logic lives on the client as well as on the server, and Google Gears threatens to give the client persistent storage as well, and the interaction between client and server can potentially have a lot more moving parts, and a developer gains a big advantage by having a basic understanding of the entire stack.
The right approach is to understand /why/ it's hard from the front-end so you can make your back-end more suitable to the front.
I still don't know how to answer when people ask if I am a front-end or a back-end developer. I just don't get it. I used to think I could claim to be a back-end guy because I do know SQL, but I don't know how to make pretty mockups in Photoshop. But now it's apparent that knowing HTML and CSS and JS makes me a "front-end" developer in many people's eyes, so I've gone back to not knowing how to answer. It's like asking whether I walk primarily with my right leg or my left.
I think the dichotomy broke completely when Ajax came on the scene. In earlier times it was possible to pretend that the division between client-side code and server-side code was aligned with the division between the presentation layer and the logic and persistence layers of your app. That alignment was never very clean (there are limits to what you can rearrange with CSS alone, and while JS can theoretically rearrange everything the result is liable to be slow and fragile and terrifying to behold, and obviously the needs of the interface designer need to drive the optimization of the back-end data store, etc.), but you could still pretend. The ever-increasing role of client-side JS makes that view of the world less tenable. Now some logic lives on the client as well as on the server, and Google Gears threatens to give the client persistent storage as well, and the interaction between client and server can potentially have a lot more moving parts, and a developer gains a big advantage by having a basic understanding of the entire stack.