Comment by midrus
5 years ago
I've been pretty skeptical about SPAs but having tried out Svelte for a few side projects, I have to admin I was probably directing my skepticism to the wrong thing, probably React was the cause of my dislike for SPAs. Svelte looks really awesome and the simplicity it brings back is invaluable. I really wish it takes off, for real. Looks very promising.
FWIW I would give Inertia a look. I’ve been using it as the glue between an SPA and my backend, and for me it’s been a best of both worlds experience. Nearly stateless front-end, atomic deploys, easy to understand, no client side routing. Yet you still get the very snappy SPA experience and the nice DX from componentization of your UI. I highly recommend it.
Yeah, I really like the middle ground approach, but having tried almost everything in the category, my favourite by a long margin is Unpoly.
What bits were misdirected? What worries did you have?
The complexity and the over engineering going on, mostly.
Things such as redux, rxjs, observables, thunks, etc really put me off when you compare that to just MVC with Rails for example, plus most applications I worked with React were just forms anyway, with some fancy controls/widgets on top.
Not having a clear way, even today with Next, to load data (client side, without doing SSR) before a route transition happens (which leads to spinners everywhere), and now the solution seems to be all the server components, concurrent mode, suspense, etc, etc which to me is just mind blowing how complex things became.
Also hooks which conceptually they make a lot of sense and I like them, but then you have to do all the dependencies tracking manually, they have a lot of gotchas (async in useEffect, ordering, etc).
The "rerendering of everything" and the need for manual memo, useMemo, useCallback, etc and the whole "don't optimize it until you need it" (guess what, a my company as in many others it never was a product priority to make it fast).
Now, take the good parts of the approach, remove all these complications, and you have a very nice and clean approach to do web apps. To me that is what Svelte brings back.
I don't agree that everything has to revolve around MVC. It's not a hammer for every problem. This is why other patterns like MVVM, MVP and other abbreviations were introduced to solve broader needs.
React starting as purely a UI library paved the way for people to find new ways to manage state and data for different kinds of applications and needs. That's how we ended up with what we have today. You can say what you wan't, but I think it's remarkable what people came up with in the past 10 years.
And these solutions are just optional things you can choose in case you have a need for them. React comes with a lot of things for building rich UI. Sure some things may require more code, but so is the nature of writing applications with specific requirements.
Server components, Concurrent Mode and Suspense came out of the frustrations that it was hard to provide great user experience and avoid common pitfalls with async I/O and high performance because they were limited by React. The solutions they came up with, while not perfect (or even ready yet) aims to solve these issues, while avoiding breaking backwards compatibility and that could be further improved upon while also avoiding breaking the API.
With regards to hooks, I agree that it can be annoying to have to manually pass dependencies. But this is unfortunately the nature of JavaScript and React's mission to not break things. The alternative would require massively changing the API. We've seen other attempts at remedying this with projects like CrankJS and SolidJS that takes a clean slate, preserving the concept of React, but taking a more modern approach on these concepts, as they have freedom of designing their own API from scratch.
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Oh, okay. Thank you for the explanation.
Yes. I totally agree with this. That's why I chose Vue as well. As I've gotten into it more I've found chunks that certainly feel over engineered here and there too.