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>> It's not a frontend problem

From my perspective as a Java developer, it's a frontend problem.

I've been employed as a Java developer for over a quarter of a century. For a little over the first ten years of that, I did full stack development, and that was the norm at the companies I worked for.

That has changed where it is now typical for there to be a separate team for frontend, and often three teams for frontend (web, iOS and Android). For me that change was around the time of AngularJS -> Angular.

Yes, Java was changing rapidly in the first ten years or so, very rapidly in the first 3 years. But that is over. Java 5 was a huge change, and there were some major features in Java 8, but Java 8 was in 2014. My team only switched to Java 11 recently. Java 24 is out now. I haven't used any Java 11 features. I don't even know what they are. I haven't learned a single new language feature for a decade.

Build tools are the same for the last 15 years. IDE is the same for the last 20 years. The main frameworks I use have been the same for 10 years. When I switched to my last job, the code base was structured exactly the way my previous team's was.

Building web services in Java is a solved problem. It's completely boring, in a good way. It's COBOL.

Frontend was changing rapidly in the late 90's/early 00's also, but it has kept changing rapidly the entire time since then. The pet UI project I build a few years ago is completely outdated.

Any of the Java projects that I worked on in the post-EJB era, you could easily find a Java developer today who could step in and immediately be productive working on them, even if the developer wasn't born yet when they were created. There would be a few outdated libraries to learn, maybe.



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