> Recently I wasted several hours wrangling my dev environment only to find out that the browser frontend was talking to the wrong version of the backend.
I have never faced this problem even though I hard-code the port. It's because I run the server program through VS Code's debugger. If there's already a session, it would warn me.
True! But, you wouldn't just need SRV support in browsers--you'd need it in every part of your dev environment / stack that touches the network. If your backend talks to a database, then your backend needs to support SRV. So you need SRV support in your standard library and your browser.
But at a larger level this tool just makes everything work so smoothly. If you have two services with the same name, it pops up a notification in the tray. If you start a new process with a different name, you don't have to configure SRV; the DNS just becomes available automatically. HTTPS is auto configured. That sort of thing.
I think somebody could one day make something like this that was based on SRV, but it would still need all those niceties to make it work well for developers.
> Recently I wasted several hours wrangling my dev environment only to find out that the browser frontend was talking to the wrong version of the backend.
I have never faced this problem even though I hard-code the port. It's because I run the server program through VS Code's debugger. If there's already a session, it would warn me.
> why on earth are we still using simple numbers to describe which process to connect to? Why not use names instead.
Not super popular, but: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SRV_record
Yep, my immediate reaction was "because browsers refuse to support SRV records" (although I think there was some new variant that kinda worked?)
True! But, you wouldn't just need SRV support in browsers--you'd need it in every part of your dev environment / stack that touches the network. If your backend talks to a database, then your backend needs to support SRV. So you need SRV support in your standard library and your browser.
But at a larger level this tool just makes everything work so smoothly. If you have two services with the same name, it pops up a notification in the tray. If you start a new process with a different name, you don't have to configure SRV; the DNS just becomes available automatically. HTTPS is auto configured. That sort of thing.
I think somebody could one day make something like this that was based on SRV, but it would still need all those niceties to make it work well for developers.