Targeting A Better Life Above The Service Tier

In 2007, Rajat Taneja, Vikrant Todankar and I co-wrote a white paper called Life above the Service Tier. This was back when web applications were built using server-side frameworks. Our paper decried these frameworks as representing anti-patterns, and recommended that web applications ought to run independently within client devices (such as mobile phones and desktops), and only make service calls to the back-end.

We called this architecture SOFEA, for Service-Oriented Front-End Architecture.

The core principle of SOFEA was to decouple the three orthogonal concerns of Application Download, Presentation Flow, and Data Interchange, which were tightly coupled in server-based frameworks.

This recommendation seemed revolutionary at the time, as witnessed by the many blog posts and comments that it received. However, when we fast-forward 16 years to today, SOFEA is in fact the way the vast majority of web applications are being built. All the popular web frameworks, such as Angular, React, Vue, and Svelte, are SOFEA-based.

Everyone should have lived happily thereafter, but the main problem being faced by development shops today is that these web frameworks are too complex and heavyweight. It takes months or years to acquire true expertise in any of them. Full Stack developers are hard to come by, because both the back-end and the front-end require in-depth skills. This has made it costly and time-consuming not only to build applications, but also to maintain them over their lifetime.

Rajat, Vikrant and I discussed this once again, and we were joined by another friend, Subbu Balakrishnan.

The time seemed ripe to release an update to the SOFEA paper, this time recommending a simpler architecture for the front-end. We have been tracking developments in the industry over the past 16 years, and have detected some paradigm shifts taking place, which the most popular web frameworks have not taken advantage of. Other frameworks have leapfrogged them, but aren't as well-known, or as comprehensive.

Here's our high-level view of industry trends.

What we have come up with is a new architectural style, a successor to SOFEA that we call BUCAREST (for Browser-based Unified Client Architecture (using) REST). This is not just a theoretical concept, but practically implementable using frameworks that are available today. While no single framework today can implement BUCAREST in its entirety, a combination of frameworks used in alignment with the patterns we describe will do the job just fine.

The two frameworks we have identified are Alpine.js and HTMX.

The diagram describing this architecture is here:

This new white paper, which describes BUCAREST in detail and explains how to use it to build web applications in a much simpler way, is called Targeting a Better Life above the Service Tier.

We hope the BUCAREST style will greatly simplify web development in the coming years. Thanks to its simplicity, it should also be possible for those who have considered themselves back-end developers to venture into front-end developent too. We daresay there will be more "Full Stack" developers in the years to come.

Download our white paper, have a read and tell us what you think!