So this will replace Bootstrap 4, which was released in early 2018 and will reach end-of-life before the end of this year. [0]
Could someone explain the target audience for a framework with this rate of churn?
Are people really creating websites that are expected to live for less than three years? Or are people working on longer-term products and expecting to do a major rewrite every few years?
Speaking to the lifetime of each major version—Bootstrap 4 can't go into any kind of LTS situation until v5 is fully stable. That's going to take a few months just being honest, so I fully expect v4 to be around into 2021.
We've also maintained security patches and more for v3 where appropriate well past the LTS for the web's sake. While we try to have guidelines around it, we want to help move things forward for the web :).
This might be a weird explanation, but maybe they just have fewer bugs to fix?
Correct me if I’m wrong, but “end-of-life” in this context just means that it’ll stop receiving active development and bug fixes. For a mostly-CSS framework, I wonder how much the average Bootstrap 4 user needs more development.
> Are people really creating websites that are expected to live for less than three years? Or are people working on longer-term products and expecting to do a major rewrite every few years?
"Yes". I imagine it's a bit of both. Would shops doing client work worry about the long term maintenance about the work they are doing? Using Bootstrap, knowing it will be end of life in 1-2 years is probably in their favour. They get to use a shiny new framework to impress the client and can sign a rewrite/tech debt contract in 4-6 years!
My personal experience with Bootstrap is that the upgrade story is fairly reasonable and we also have software on Bootstrap 2 still running just fine. It was the style of the time and the app shows it, but there's been no need to rewrite that portion.
I can't say I agree. I had a miserable time going from 3 to 4 because it also dropped Less support. Most of the blame goes to css but I do not welcome churn on a library like this.
With a strongly typed API, most of the breaking changes cause errors so you can just go through and fix them. With code then you can also cover behaviour regressions with unit tests.
With css / bootstrap, you get zero errors, just a broken visual layout. You get a lengthy migration guide https://getbootstrap.com/docs/4.4/migration/ that you have to manually go through line by line, searching the codebase for each affected feature. The affected features are not single css classes but how multiple different css classes interact in hierarchies with changing requirements on the DOM structure. Fixes don't just mean updating the css but changing the DOM too. So much for css separating appearance from content.
Some of the breaking changes are things like changing fundamental default sizes of things like fonts or media-queries which for a given site are not things you can change willy nilly so if you need to preserve the existing appearance you now need to rewrite very basic things and decide how much pain you going to through by fighting Bootstrap's changed defaults.
You only know you are actually done by looking at the appearance of every part of the site, on all the relevant devices, in all the relevant conditions so that each media query triggers. Ugh, it's a nightmare.
> My personal experience with Bootstrap is that the upgrade story is fairly reasonable and we also have software on Bootstrap 2 still running just fine. It was the style of the time and the app shows it, but there's been no need to rewrite that portion.
Same here. Our app has been on 2.3.2 for the longest time. Just not a high priority to update it at the moment, and not to mention it's just a giant effort.
Other than not getting newer features, are there any reasons you'd need to upgrade? Are there security concerns? I guess maybe some XSS with some of the JQuery stuff but that should be easily mitigated.
Seems like a CSS framework is the least likely to need constant patching.
I still have a ton of sites on Bootstrap 3 and know of a large number of “rebuild every decade” sites on 3. The nice thing is at least with older versions, they tend to work okay for years with no maintenance.
That’s probably changing as the web incorporates more SPA type stuff.
I think you're right. I know lots of products built on 3 that have "migrate to 4" in their backlog but it's an easy one to push out... for years.
Part of this churn fatigue is that we depend on community support for a lot of these technologies. Support for something like .net or Java used to be rudiculously long, but as they've switched to OS-friendly development practices the pace of releases has increased and lifetimes diminished. Coupled with building on more and more shaky and temporal abstractions and a web app written today won't compile in 6 months.
Could someone explain the target audience for a framework with this rate of churn?
Are people really creating websites that are expected to live for less than three years? Or are people working on longer-term products and expecting to do a major rewrite every few years?
[0] https://github.com/twbs/release