ISSUE 254: More than One Way to Render a Page 

“Chaos engineering is about building a culture of resilience in the presence of unexpected system outcomes.”

Welcome to our new series “Security @ Scale” on The New Stack Makers with Okta. This podcast explores security in modern environments with stories from the trenches including security horror stories and fantastic failures.

In this episode, co-hosts Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack, and Randall Degges, head of developer advocacy at security services provider Okta, speak with guest Marc Rogers, vice president, cybersecurity of Okta, and co-founder of the CTI League — a global volunteer emergency response center — to discuss the anatomy of what will likely be considered one of the most disruptive hacks in the history of Wall Street. It could also change how institutional and individual investors buy and sell — and short — stocks in the future that are traded on U.S. exchanges.

More than One Way to Render a Page

Where is the best place to render fancy “dynamic” personalized web pages? Should it happen near the user, on the browser, with JavaScript frameworks such as ReactJS? Or should all the rendering take place back at the server, with technologies such as Node.JS, or Next.JS, or even through server software tools such as Apache Server Side Includes (SSI)? 

This has been an ongoing conversation since the first model-view-controller was introduced to the web as a way to match rich backend content with front end-user interests. Because HTML was originally created just to format pages, not interpret the logic needed to create them, developers gravitated to JavaScript frameworks, which in most cases have the browser parse the page logic: Frontend is closer to the user, though is limited by the computational power of the browsing device. There is no such limitation when you have powerful backend servers, though you still build up latency sending the dynamically-created pages over the wire (and wireless) to the user.  

These days, frontend JavaScript Frameworks are overwhelmingly the preferred approach, though a number of parties are trying to rethink this whole business of delivering content to the user, as well as reduce the complexity introduced by the JavaScript frameworks. This week, TNS Senior Editor Richard MacManus wrote about Yax.com, an approach that does away with full-blown JavaScript framework, deploying instead JavaScript modules (a new feature introduced in the ES6 JavaScript standard) and custom HTML elements, which browsers now recognize through the Web Components standard. As Kehoe explained:

“We once needed web application development frameworks because there was no option to write modular code or access databases in old-time HTML and JavaScript. Now custom elements make it possible to write modular HTML.”

Two weeks ago, MacManus wrote about another approach, called Hotwire, which was created by Basecamp to build its next generation email service, Hey.com. Fusing backend and frontend operations, Hotwire minimizes the amount of JavaScript needed, ditching JSON for old-school HTML-over-the-wire.

Whether or not efforts like Yax or Hotwire take off remains to be seen, but the writing is the wall: The web community will start seeing new approaches to the age-old problem of bringing the data and the services to the end user. Are we about to witness a sea change in how the web is rendered? Stay tuned …

How the Tech Community Can Do Better for Black Women

Black women make up less than 1% of the U.K. and U.S. tech industries. This is beyond unacceptable. But what are we doing to ensure diversity in the IT workplace? Most tech companies’ response to the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement last summer wasn’t a reckoning — it was performative lip service. In this feature post, TNS U.K. Correspondent Jennifer Riggins examines one real effort to build a more inclusive culture — a program called Coding Black Females, which started as a meetup as a way for local Black women to share conversations, resources and ideas about technology, and has since expanded to incorporate monthly coding sessions as well. 

Microsoft’s Dapr Introduces Cloud Native Development to the Enterprise

The idea behind Microsoft’s Distributed Application Runtime (Dapr) is to ease the typically difficult plumbing work required of developers to tie together distributed systems. Dapr provides a set of interfaces for enterprise-wide services, or “building blocks,” that make it easier to build portable applications. Microsoft’s looming presence in the enterprise may help introduce "cloud native computing" to a whole generation of developers and operations teams. 

Transparent AI: Explainable and Trainable Artificial Intelligence

“As artificial intelligence (AI) takes on increasingly complex decision making, the humans behind it are losing touch with how it derives its conclusions,” Moogsoft’s Vice President of Product Management Adam Frank writes in this contributed post. He calls for increasing transparency in AI operations as a way to minimize bias and other unintended negative side effects of the new technology.