Developers are slowly realizing the advantage of this style of application development. I remember around 06 having a discussion with another developer at the company I was with at the time. He was arguing that Ajax could change everything and I was arguing that it was just adding more layers onto an already heavily layered system. I was thinking ASP/JSP/PHP, CSS, HTML, XML, on and on and now AJAX on top of that and he was actually seeing that we could thin down the stack and reduce technical debt. I remember when he started laying it out, at some point it clicked and that was my ahha moment.
We built an app using only JS for UI logic and it was smooth, after that I said to him, I will never touch the any of the server side stuff like JSP again. From that day, I have built every app using JS as the front end languadge. For a time people would look at me weird when I would advocate for it, but now as time has gone on, the mind-shift has happened.
I still find back-end developers who are resistant, but that resistance usually fades fast when they come to realize that a) they won't have to write the JS and b) They get to offload all UI development to a specialized front-end developer. That's usually when they become the biggest advocate. I cant tell you how many back-end developers that have said to me after doing a JS UI project, how happy they where not not have to deal with UI requirements and be able to focus on the business logic.
Right, business logic and UI are distinct creative tasks. While one may enjoy both not everyone does, also requirements based design for business logic is a different mental processes than user story based flows for UI. One is very concrete and the other is known to be pretty mushy until the user actually touches it and sees how it responds. There are developers who do not like to iterate through fuzzy details and prefer very concrete data contracts. So they are very happy to stay on the other side of the REST contract. The good part is once they get a glimpse of the new world, they realize how much better it is for all parties involved. It's one of the few evolutions I have seen in the tech world where the grass truly is greener, on the other side, for all parties.
We built an app using only JS for UI logic and it was smooth, after that I said to him, I will never touch the any of the server side stuff like JSP again. From that day, I have built every app using JS as the front end languadge. For a time people would look at me weird when I would advocate for it, but now as time has gone on, the mind-shift has happened.
I still find back-end developers who are resistant, but that resistance usually fades fast when they come to realize that a) they won't have to write the JS and b) They get to offload all UI development to a specialized front-end developer. That's usually when they become the biggest advocate. I cant tell you how many back-end developers that have said to me after doing a JS UI project, how happy they where not not have to deal with UI requirements and be able to focus on the business logic.