Front-end vs Back-end question

[David Schwartz 426]

What's your take on whether a FE and BE should be accessible from the same page / form or completely separately?

 

I've seen desktop apps where the Admin / setup stuff is a totally separate app, and apps where there's a Setup / Config / Options link in a menu.

 

Wordpress is infamous for their "Meta" section with a "Login" link to get to the Admin dashboard. You can't separate them even if you wanted to.

 

SaaS solutions often take you to an Admin area that's separate from where your Users will go, and that generates the User's view elsewhere (frequently a subdomain).

 

I've never given much thought to this. But with things like TMS WebCore, IntraWeb, UniGui, and others for building web apps, now I'm curious.

[Anders Melander 1782]

6 hours ago, David Schwartz said:

What's your take on whether a FE and BE should be accessible from the same page / form or completely separately?

It depends. Next question.

[David Schwartz 426]

8 hours ago, Anders Melander said:

It depends. Next question.

depends on what? I'm curious what folks think when it comes to web apps vs. desktop apps.

[David Heffernan 2345]

Depends on all sorts of things. I guess people are finding it hard to get motivated to write it all down. 

Edited May 26, 2020 by David Heffernan

[David Schwartz 426]

nearly every question posted here can be answered with "it depends" and stop right there.

[aehimself 396]

My preference is to have as low amount of files in my built applications as possible. Therefore I usually include the admin area.

 

I really do dislike the pure "it depends" answers, but here yes, it depends on lots of different factors, including security, end-user needs and of course your own personal preference.

Security, because the admin area might contain references you don't want an average "Hacker Henry" to see with a decompiler, not even as assembly code.

End user needs, as for 3 checkboxes and a language selector the user might find it disturbing having to navigate somewhere else.

Personal preference - which codebase is easier for you to maintain? Multiple applications with less code, or one application with more?

 

And these are just the first ones which pop up in my mind, so treat this list as severely incomplete 🙂

[Fr0sT.Brutal 900]

Hoorray, pretty short post from David :))))

 

I think whether divide apps or not depends on

0) Architecture

If user = admin sometimes then any other factors are unrelated, just do what you like.

1) Security

If a user doesn't possess admin interface binary, it couldn't inspect what you probably want to hide

2) Use-case

How the admin app is to be used. Whether it could be run from the same PC as user app? How frequently? Whether an admin could occasionally copy the app to machine to do some things or it will be very unhandy?

 

Anyway it's very generic subject. Without an architecture of a system the questions will be just a set of preferences...

[Sherlock 663]

I have basic settings right in my application...for windows. In iOS the settings are in the iOS settings. For the more advanced settings, that users should not meddle with, I have an administrative web page. And the even deeper stuff has to be done by my support team in a Linux-shell.