New React docs pretend SPAs don't exist anymore

https://wasp-lang.dev/blog/2023/03/17/new-react-docs-pretend-spas-dont-exist

by matijash • 3 years ago

199 218 3 years ago

jollyllama• 3 years ago

So they're trying to corrupt the meaning of "framework" to mean only "full stack framework"

matijash5• 3 years ago

yeah in a way. react gets closer to being synonymous with next/remix rather than viewed as a separate, standalone library.

canadiantim• 3 years ago

too much commitment for me

riidom• 3 years ago

Wasp is a pretty interesting project. Actually waiting until they are not react-only (if that will ever happen).

matijash5• 3 years ago

glad you find it interesting! the plan is to support more frameworks/langs moving forward. The poly-frontend option might be even fairly easier to introduce since Wasp is doing more stuff closer to the server.

ecf• 3 years ago

Hype driven developers/marketers believe the only type of websites that exists are those which need indexable content for SEO purposes. More news at 11

weird-eye-issue3• 3 years ago

SEO is an important part of marketing for a lot of companies. It's not hype, it's just regular marketing

eschaton2• 3 years ago

That should be true though, if it doesn’t have indexable content whose URL could theoretically be permanent, it shouldn’t be crammed into a web page. Write an application instead.

jonplackett• 3 years ago

I think to sway the only benefit of Next.js is DEO is underselling how useful it is.

Sure SEO is important for most people anyway, but having multiple pages that load instantly rather than having to wait for a server call is also pretty handy. Plus auth working better.

I don’t see why next wouldn’t be the default and react now the outlier.

NerdiOrg4• 3 years ago

Agreed, this is how our team uses it. We hire React devs and teach them Next.js day 1 and essentially their React experience is helpful but Next is the main focus for the devs.

fabian2k• 3 years ago

As far as I understand you can use these frameworks to write SPAs as well. I have no idea how well supported that use case is in the end.

I find the idea that you want to handle data fetching and routing in a framework to be reasonably convincing. There are advantages here, and it's easy to get into a bit of a mess if you just fetch data in each component.

The part that has stopped me from looking at the frameworks until now is that they add a lot of parts I don't need, and the documentation seems to be focused on the SSR part. And then there are React server side components, which is another new concept I need to understand. Maybe the frameworks are a good fit for my SPA use cases, but it'll take quite a bit of time to find out if that is true.

jameshart7• 3 years ago

Basically if you do a static export from next.js and ignore routing, you get a react SPA.

You can do the same in Gatsby, but it's probably a waste of time.

But...

With an index.html file containing a createRoot(document.getElementById('root')).render(<MyApp/>) call, and parcel or vite or webpack, you can produce much the same thing.

Possible that next.js will give you easier access to some more interesting ways to split your JS bundle up - but also possible it will fight you if you continue to insist on not taking advantage of SSR.

leerob7• 3 years ago

If you roll your own with a bundler, you will also need to integrate a router. Next.js is providing a routing layer for you. If you want to stick with a static/SPA the entire time, that's fine. You don't have to use SSR unless you need it.

https://nextjs.org/docs/advanced-features/static-html-export

bryik• 3 years ago

I don't think that's a fair characterization of the "Start a New React Project" page [0]. Next.js is the first option listed and is described as a way to "create React apps of any size—from a mostly static blog to a complex dynamic application."

This reads to me like "Next.js can do SPAs (like CRA) plus static sites and SSR". Next.js' site even says "The core of Next.js has been designed to enable starting as a static site (or Single-Page Application)" [1].

0 - https://react.dev/learn/start-a-new-react-project

1 - https://nextjs.org/docs/advanced-features/static-html-export

leerob7• 3 years ago

Your understanding is correct – Next.js can do static sites, SPAs, SSR – all of them.

We (just today) updated the Next.js docs linked based on feedback around this to make it more clear. Hopefully this helps, let me know if you have other feedback.

jameshart7• 3 years ago

"The core of Next.js has been designed to enable starting as a static site" is a little contradicted by the fact static export is considered an 'advanced feature' though.

That said, I'm not sure why running `next export` is considered 'advanced'.

leerob7• 3 years ago

I'd say this is documentation organization "debt" – there's a bunch of "advanced" features that aren't that advanced. We're aware and fixing with the new docs -> https://beta.nextjs.org/

darepublic• 3 years ago

I only use next.js in the static context.

synergy205• 3 years ago

Vercel's next.js and sveltekit are both SSR first because that's its business needs, which has nothing to do with mine(CSR only case), and Vercel is actively pushing the SSR-can-do-it-all in the open source space, I feel it is very much short-sighted.

Just use vuejs which is the only one truly never forces SSR on you if you do not want to have anything to do with it.

Rauchg2• 3 years ago

I actually strongly advocate for: SSR and server is the absolute best default[1], and Next.js gives you tremendous flexibility on where to place your compute[2], including skipping SSR altogether[3], with the best-in-class static export that can actually at least put some content in your HTML instead of a blank page[4]

[1] https://rauchg.com/2014/7-principles-of-rich-web-application...

[2] https://twitter.com/rauchg/status/1637136013083684864

[3] https://twitter.com/timneutkens/status/1636693508223270912

[4] https://twitter.com/dan_abramov/status/1636827365677383700

chambers• 3 years ago

Speaking as an engineering manager, vercel’s approach seems to cater to the last market where overengineering and complexity were status symbols that middle management was happy to pay for. When the headcount was free, there weren’t many questions from upper management why basic UIs required so much heavy lifting by (overly) experienced engineers.

In the new market, there will be much more scrutiny on costs and the complexity that creates it. The prospect of hiring a “React Engineer” with 7+ years of experience to build a cookie cutter UI, will be just as questionable as forcing the front end and backend to use the same technology and framework governed by one single vendor.

I predict vercel will have a rough time.

eric-burel• 3 years ago

next export, the feature that produces a "true" SPA out of a Next.js app, has been under-developed for along time. However the very newest developments in Next 13 seems to fix that, making Next.js truly versatile

leerob7• 3 years ago

New docs are a work-in-progress here: https://beta.nextjs.org/docs/configuring/static-export

throw_m239339• 3 years ago

Starting a "new react project" should be basically creating an HTML file, and adding a script tag linking to React the JS library. Why are these developers always trying to obfuscate everything with tons and tons of layers of indirection all the time? You don't need to "bundle" anything and certainly not use some server just to add Javascript to a page (unless it's a matter of CSP of course) and you should certainly not have to rely on nodejs or cli tool X,Y,Z...

Somehow the JS/Node dev community managed to re-invent JEE web profile, and is very close to re-invent Glassfish as well at that point, but worse because it didn't learn anything from Java enterprise... this madness needs to stop.

super2562• 3 years ago

I honestly find this way more intuitive than JEE profiles.

It just makes sense when you take react as what it is: a library. Now, if you want amenities like a router you need to build it yourself or use something existing. 99.9% of people want this, so why not point them into the right direction?

KRAKRISMOTT• 3 years ago

Because it's slow. Hard to do treeshaking if everything is in random dependencies that need to be downloaded at runtime. You also get a flash of white if you don't pre-render your sites.

jameshart7• 3 years ago

You can actually still do this, and it is kind of a shame it's not documented on react.dev

You need to pull in react, plus Babel standalone, and then you can use <script type="text/jsx"> tags, which means you can bootstrap react components onto your page. But you are going to be basically running a compiler in your user's web browser. That's fine if you want to run that way, but Babel has docs that explain why you probably shouldn't (https://babeljs.io/docs/babel-standalone#when-not-to-use-bab...).

All you need is these two scripts:

    <script crossorigin src="https://unpkg.com/@babel/standalone/babel.js"></script>
    <script crossorigin src="https://unpkg.com/react@18/umd/react.development.js"></script>

[Edit - also need ReactDOM, sorry:

    <script crossorigin src="https://unpkg.com/react-dom@18/umd/react-dom.development.js"></script>

]

I think it would help if more react tutorials started from here, because it shows why you need a build process.

Here, as a JSFiddle: the React 'Hello World' they don't want you to see: https://jsfiddle.net/smLa1bco/

brailsafe2• 3 years ago

Building up my initial knowledge like you describe was the only way I could generate the enthusiasm for working on top of so many layers of abstraction.

alex_sf3• 3 years ago

Because they _need_ cool tool A, utility library B, theme C, and then helper library D because B doesn't work quite right.

rk06• 3 years ago

Because react is not developed with that usecase in mind. And it is not recommended for production anyway.

If you really need to use html with script tag, go with Vue/alpine

leros• 3 years ago

I just want to say, as a developer that just wants to get stuff done, I'm so annoyed by frameworks needing a meta framework, etc, etc. I want something as simple as CRA to be enough.

super2562• 3 years ago

React is a library, not a framework, so you usually need something on top.

jameshart7• 3 years ago

CRA has never been merely 'enough'. CRA started at 'too much' and started adding features from there.

psnehanshu8• 3 years ago

I will love to have something like CRA-Webpack+Vite.

ralusek• 3 years ago

There are a myriad of reasons why I prefer SPA to server rendered content for most applications. The main exception is if I have a public facing, unauthenticated application that I need indexed, I'll go for SSR.

Off the top of my head, here are benefits to SPA:

- I can just serve a few static files from a CDN. Every user gets the same client.

- Most requests made by the application are actually smaller. I'm just loading the data I need, rather than the data, markup and styling.

- It's an actual client application talking to a data API. It's the same API the rest of my client applications are talking to, be it a mobile API, native, CLI, etc.

- It's a much easier mental model. Interactivity without having to give consideration to whether or not it will disrupt whether it can be rendered. I build my application like a realtime application and just make requests for the data I need when I need it

- I don't have to think about exposing backend secrets, or trying to do things I'm mistakenly assuming to necessarily run in one environment or the other

- I can be much more explicit about loading and caching data when I would like to

Even most of the cons of a SPA can be ameliorated. The biggest con is a larger up front load, but that can be mitigated by code splitting and lazy loading. The fact that it's a handful of static files means that the application is basically cached, too. And SPAs are for applications, not websites. Most people using SPAs want the application experience to be optimal, not necessarily their initial first time load. They want small requests, interactivity, live feedback. This is all possible with SSR, but nowhere near as simple.

matijash5• 3 years ago

this is a really good summary, thanks!

weird-eye-issue3• 3 years ago

You get all these benefits using something like NextJS's static site exports which I'm using right now on Cloudflare Pages (it's built-in). Works perfect for a SPA plus you get the SEO benefits. Only downside is we had to use query param for URLs instead of path-based params but it works the same in the code

qudat• 3 years ago

Bravo, I agree with all your points.

React frameworks are mostly hype in order to justify using a particular PaaS. They’ve hired all the influencers and using it to their advantage.

There definitely are good reasons to use SSR and these frameworks, but a fully interactive web app that acts like a desktop app isn’t one of them.

All of that to say I have no issues with it and react is still awesome. It’s a view _library_ and works great for its relatively restrained API. Most of the new features are opt-in and I don’t really touch them (besides hooks).

naikus• 3 years ago

Totally agree! Plus if you use PWA, you get some benefits of an installable apps (not on all platforms though) but the support is alright on iOS too (more features are supported than before) I built a small demo app with 3 views (each loading lazily when first requested or loading in background using service worker) with view transitions, back button and scroll position retention. (built for mobile devices but works on desktops too) https://stage-starter.netlify.app

88913527• 3 years ago

I don't understand the pivot back to SSR. Tearing down and standing up the entire DOM and page memory between navigations is just unnecessary work. Little things like maintaining scroll position in the page's navigation bar meaningfully improve usability and are only achievable with a SPA-based approach. This doesn't discount the challenges of building SPAs: bundle sizes, performance, etc. can be concerns if not managed. That's true of any application.

ZhadruOmjar• 3 years ago

Bored software engineers just want to keep making changes rather than moving to a new problem space.

knome• 3 years ago

the biggest problem with SPAs is none of the devs making them seem to remember how nice it was to open different pages of a site in different tabs. it's all horribly phone/tablet centric. middle-clicking doesn't even pop links in new tabs because they break basic browser features. you're lucky if you can even tell what's a real link and what's just going to rearrange your current page.

wincy• 3 years ago

And even big sites built by well paid engineers that should know better (I’m looking at you Microsoft Azure!) have these issues! Sometimes middle click works. Sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes right click open in new tab works. It’s so damned annoying.

kitsunesoba• 3 years ago

Find in Page is another common casualty, and frustratingly it’s not always re-implemented by the SPA.

I think a lot of the ire against SPAs and other flavors of JS heavy pages would dissipate if devs made a point of trying to not unnecessarily break browser features and when breakage is unavoidable, furnishing replacements for the broken features that are as good as or better than the originals.

madeofpalk• 3 years ago

I don't understand this. All the popular/used routing frameworks by default support "open link in new tab" (render <a href="..." />, and listen to onClick to do SPA transition). Developer have to deviate from the easy and commonly documented way of doing things to break this. Any website that doesn't do this is fundamentally broken and built by teams that deliberately disregarded this behaviour.

tshaddox5• 3 years ago

This only happens now with an SPA due to laughable incompetence or deliberate disregard. You have to go out of your way to not use whatever Link component or similar tool provided by your SPA library/framework of choice. Any team that incompetent or negligent would be just as likely to break link behavior even if they aren’t using an SPA.

I’m surprised the criticism is still ubiquitous: it’s either 5+ years out of date or some people run into these terrible sites a lot for some reason.

barrongineer• 3 years ago

Typically with SSR, only the initial load is server rendered. Subsequent navigations are client rendered.

layer8• 3 years ago

Little things like maintaining scroll position in the page's navigation bar […] are only achievable with a SPA-based approach.

That’s not true. I wrote non-SPA web applications in the mid-aughts that maintained scroll position throughout server roundtrips, using JavaScript and storing the current scroll position in hidden fields upon submit. Even multiple scroll positions for nested panes. It also adjusted the saved scroll positions correctly when new elements were added to or removed from the page during the server roundtrip. This was encapsulated in a server-side HTML rendering framework.

cooperadymas2• 3 years ago

Since when have SPAs figured out maintaining scroll position? That's not my experience at all.

seandoe• 3 years ago

What is going to change the scroll position on a state or "page" change? It's not that they figured it out, it's just the nature of a single page.

tshaddox5• 3 years ago

I think you might be using the term “SSR” in a non-standard way. In the context of JavaScript apps, SSR refers to an initial pre-rendering of the HTML of a SPA page on the first browser page load. Subsequent navigations in that same browser tab would render on the client just like an SPA that doesn’t have SSR.

You might be talking about what the JavaScript community has started to call “MPA,” which doesn’t seem to have converged on a clear meaning but seems to usually imply that some or all page navigations do involve a trip to the web server and an HTML response.

youngtaff• 3 years ago

SSR isn’t actually rendering though… it’s generation of markup just like PHP does… sure sometimes it contains data to rehydrate the page just like early .Net components used to

The various JS frameworks seem to have taken a concept that was common and tried to rebrand it which just adds more confusion

jameshart7• 3 years ago

Fullstack react frameworks aren't purely SSR - they're isomorphic JS apps, which can render an initial page load serverside, then use clientside routing, suspense, serverside components, and clientside rehydration to progressively update the DOM without a full page refresh.

They are basically delivered as SPAs, with an integrated, isomorphic backend-for-frontend service embedded in the origin server.

They just don't feel like SPAs, because they have a multipage (routing) framework, and isomorphic rendering means those paths can be directly loaded from the server - while any subsequent navigation just updates your UI clientside.

In the case of static conteent-based sites, that SSR can even be done ahead of time, as a static built-time render, and the pieces of data needed to load different pieces of content into the SPA ('pages') get dumped out as static JSON resources. That's what Gatsby offers particularly as its specialty versus next.js.

eurasiantiger5• 3 years ago

Next.js can also do Gatsby-like static generation, but also update those generated pages if the content changes in the backend. They call it incremental static regeneration (ISR).

quickthrower2• 3 years ago

Modern SSR is for the first page load. After this all navigation and interaction is AJAX.

robertoandred4• 3 years ago

I don’t think the author understands what a SPA is.

seattle_spring• 3 years ago

Nor most of the commenters here. SSR on page load doesn't mean it's not a SPA from that point forward. Done right, pages will render appropriately either on the server or on the client with the same code.

Xeoncross2• 3 years ago

I'm still waiting for preact.js + htmx.org mashup. It probably exists somewhere, maybe https://docs.astro.build/en/concepts/islands/ or something.

I just want a quick way to throw some react hooks or web components into a dom element using a library that is less than 1,000 lines of code.

BiteCode_dev4• 3 years ago

Why do I hear so much about htmx and so little about unpolly, which seems everything htmx promise but with additional high level primitives for the common task?

omnimus4• 3 years ago

Unpoly dev is german nobody cares about abd doesnt go on podcasts vs htmx author is american that does marketing well. Same goes for alpine js where the author is “famous” dev.

Pretty typical with open source projects tbh. Many of them win thanks to marketing more than anything else.

omnimus4• 3 years ago

Sorry but thats not a good combo.

htmx is literally html extension. it is aimed at adding interaction to static html. Preact/react are completely opposite approach to that.

dmix5• 3 years ago

A lot of people still mix jQuery and React in the same parent project. Mostly just via legacy support when using existing serverside frameworks but still sometimes having the fallback easy DOM/event stuff is just easier when you need to get it done (keeping the HTML/views isolated from each other of course so you don’t mix concepts). It doesn’t sound pretty but they can serve dual purposes. I don’t know enough about HTMX on how it would work implementation wise though and what type of setup.

Xeoncross2• 3 years ago

I probably didn't explain it well enough.

Preact is the tiny alternative to React (I still think preact could be smaller if they only focused on hooks).

I htmx is too bloated, while it's much smaller than the React codebase - I want the tiny, <1k loc alternative that literally just makes working forms and href links into dynamic fetch() responses and maybe adds additional support for auto-refresh from websockets or SSE.

AgentME• 3 years ago

This comment thread is a little funny because every single HN thread outside of this one rants super aggressively about webpages that don't show any content before JS loads, but this thread has managed to collect the opposite group together for once because React's docs have updated to stop actively recommending tools that force that problem to happen.

Waterluvian• 3 years ago

I noticed that too. It’s a humble reminder to us that Hacker News isn’t one entity. It’s many people with different opinions, taking turns deciding when they want to be heard.

tzs• 3 years ago

I'd like to see a browser extension or something similar for HN that would let one add tags to user names, and display those tags next to user names on comments and submissions.

I often see someone take a pro-X position in some discussion and have a vague recollection that I've seen them take an anti-X position in some other discussion but it would be too much work to go digging through their comment history to check that.

For example, people who argue we need to ban cars in cities and suburbs because they are dangerous for kids playing in the street but who argue against every proposal to protect kids from online dangers saying that it should entirely be the parent's responsibility to control where their kids go.

Or people whose strong criticisms of most police procedure go completely out the window when the discussion involves some kind of crime that they personally have been a victim of and there they argue for more surveillance and easier warrant requirements.

My guess is that a lot of cases it is just good old fashioned self-centered thinking. But some probably have some good justification for the seeming contradiction which could lead to some interesting and insightful discussion.

edgyquant• 3 years ago

It can be true that SPAs are overused and that people think of react as an SPA framework.

timcobb• 3 years ago

This is the most interesting observation here

hamilyon2• 3 years ago

This is not unusual for HN. I noticed that the bashing and praising Unix come in similar proportions.

If the publication criticises Unix, it's comment section lokks like Unix fans have the loudest voice. The other day, commenting on other publication, virtues of Unix have been forgotten, and the comment thread praises some alternative.

notfed• 3 years ago

It's almost as if the community has a diversity of opinions.

seydor• 3 years ago

my observation is that the community (here) has converging opinions, but the groupthink changes over time. At some point it seemed SPA was all the rage, now there is a reactionary wave

never_inline• 3 years ago

But only few comments contain nuance that I come to this site to read.

BiteCode_dev4• 3 years ago

So after graphql, micro services, nosql and serverless, the SPA + "libs not framework" crowd join the "woooops!" club.

Ignoring the noise is really becoming a key skill to survive as a programmer.

dmix5• 3 years ago

SPAs, microservices, nosql (Redis), and serverless are all still alive and well, they just aren’t a hammer for all problems like (some) people treated them originally. Nerds getting overexcited about new tech is an old story and it will continue to happen indefinitely as much as we like to smug post about it.

IDK about GraphQL since I’ve not used it but I’ve read lots of stuff recently about frameworks/ORMs working to better support this type of thing more directly/natively.

BiteCode_dev4• 3 years ago

That's exactly my point.

roflyear6• 3 years ago

Graphql is only awful once you introduce abstractions. By itself it's really a great idea and works well.

jameshart7• 3 years ago

Being too eager to dismiss a technology and move on is just as much of a bandwagon-jump as being too eager to adopt it in the first place.

The Gartner Hype Cycle[1] has both a 'peak of inflated expectations' and a 'trough of disillusionment'.

The thing a lot of tech cynics fail to spot is that both of them are wrong about the long term value of the technology.

The 'plateau of productivity' awaits, where graphql, nosql, serverless, and SPAs will join every other technology, finding productive use in their appropriate niche.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle

6510• 3 years ago

The 'plateau of productivity' awaits, where graphql, nosql, serverless, and SPAs will join every other technology, finding productive use in their appropriate niche.

I keep thinking of the tower of babel.

God was concerned that humans had blasphemed by building the tower to avoid a second flood so God brought into existence multiple languages. Thus, humans were divided into linguistic groups, unable to understand one another.

see? Now you can be wrong with the rest of us :)

datavirtue2• 3 years ago

I have to agree. I ignored tailwindcss for far too long. Pry it from my cold dead fingers.

alex_sf3• 3 years ago

Honestly, the signal is just to avoid whatever full-time JS developers are getting into.

MartijnHols2• 3 years ago

The signal is to avoid new technologies with marketing engines behind them for at least a few years. And anyone who is gullible enough to believe them, which are more likely the new people learning to code and yelling about the new shiny libraries they found than full time developers that are actually productive rather than bored.

datavirtue2• 3 years ago

Winner!

mock-possum• 3 years ago

Get ready to have a lot of trouble finding work as a js dev if you’re not into whatever full time js devs are getting into.

eurasiantiger5• 3 years ago

What are you on about? GraphQL is absolutely essential in enterprise systems.

roflyear6• 3 years ago

In my experience it's the poorly implemented abstractions on top of your ORM of choice that make graphql a bad time. It itself is really a great way to do things imo

robertoandred4• 3 years ago

I don’t think you understand what any of those terms mean.

dzogchen• 3 years ago

If you want the control and low overhead of Vite but don't want to implement everything a framework gives you, vite-plugin-ssr might be interesting for you.

It is basically Next.js as a do-one-thing-well Vite plugin (its slogan).

https://vite-plugin-ssr.com/

dmix5• 3 years ago

That looks perfect for what I was looking for on a side project. I hope they don’t end up bloating up over the years via endless user demands and turn into another Next.js. More like a Sinatra vs Rails.

floydnoel• 3 years ago

Thanks for sharing this! Comments like yours are why I love HN comments. Despite all the arguments and negativity, I managed to find a useful comment which is directly applicable to my current needs!

I have been trying out Vite on my latest small project and was wondering if I should enable pre-rendering or perhaps alter the build process. I have markdown files which form some pages, currently they are imported and this causes the *.md files to be fetched when navigating to that page. It's mostly fine but it wouldn't be the best for blog SEO. So thanks again for giving me another option to look at, it may be just the right thing!

charcircuit• 3 years ago

This article makes the mistake of thinking SPA and SSR are mutually exclusive or opposites.

SNR benefits SPAs too.

PaulHoule• 3 years ago

If you need SSR to support an SPA it calls into question why you need an SPA at all.

python999• 3 years ago

My requirements are 99% SPA and 1% SEO

weird-eye-issue3• 3 years ago

You can use NextJS to build a SPA so the entire premise is invalid.

apatheticonion• 3 years ago

Integrating React into an MPA is quite awkward, surprised this is the target audience for it.

I love the potential of web development but of recent, it's been infected by hype-marketing and blog-engineering.

I get that it's become very accessible to write web applications and that's good for the growth of the platform - but it almost feels like this accessibility has led it to squander its potential in pursuit of unsophisticated and unambitious objectives.

Web developers today are distracted by premature over-optimisations (ignoring effective low effort optimisations) and language+platform features that are a great, but kinda useless from a project development standpoint (time/money/complexity/collaborative capacity cost).

As a result, platform developers are distracted implementing features that don't innovate the platform - so we sit and wait for the truly groundbreaking things that never come because we gotta discuss the pipe operator, or adding types to the JavaScript language specification.

Meanwhile projects that can't wait for the platform to evolve flood us with Electron apps that everyone hate.

I have hope, kinda...

synergy205• 3 years ago

sveltekit is the same, ssr first, i am so sad react now becomes ssr first too, i am forced back to vue,which still has a CSR SPA first, add ssr if you need it approach.

no i dont need ssr at all, internal tools,dashboards,embedded devices,etc etc have nothing to do with ssr,nothing at all

ofrzeta• 3 years ago

Those marketing pieces are becoming a bit tedious to decypher for me. The real message is not something about React SPAs but something about Wasp? Just tell me this thing about Wasp and don't distract me with something about React.

andrewstuart• 3 years ago

I don’t want server side react.

It’s disappointing to me they’ve gone so hard on server side.

It feels like Facebook use it server side so they’ve lost interest in being purely client side.

MartijnHols2• 3 years ago

For most React apps, SSG is by far the best option. With Next.js it’s easy to do and takes less effort than a client-side app with a separate backend. SSR React was a PITA initially 2-3 years ago, but it, libraries and the frameworks have come a long way.

NerdiOrg4• 3 years ago

Nobody is forcing you to use all the capabilities. You can still use it for client-side only if you want, but the efficiency of having both is perfect for me personally and our company.

synergy205• 3 years ago

frontend is already complex enough, there are many use cases do not need SSR at all, React used to be SPA first, now is SSR first(just like svelte), which means lots of unnecessary stuff to understand for SPA programmers. I came from vue-svelte-react, now Vue is the only one still does true SPA(SSR is opt-in), so, I am back to Vue and hope it won't change to SSR-first like the rest.

React is owned by Meta which cares more about SSR, similar to Svelte. Vue is not owned by any single company, that seems like a huge huge plus now.

colechristensen• 3 years ago

What should I use to create a new SPA for a new project these days?

lastangryman• 3 years ago

Obligatory "front end is a mess" comment. I taught at a bootcamp for 6 months, it was a great experience but when we moved on to react after vanilla JS the amount of incidental complexity was a huge step up, even with create-react-app. Now they push people towards adding a server side framework at the same time, right off the bat? I think there's a real danger with new engineers entering the industry that they have no chance to develop a proper mental model of the underlying tech stack the way so many libraries, frameworks, packages, bundlers are thrown together just to get something working. You think the docs should just start with using plain React, and then branch off in to SPA Vs SSR later.

devwastaken• 3 years ago

React is for Facebook problems. Facebook is not concerned with "new engineers" at this time, nor have they ever really. Big tech contributes the least to education and pays little in taxes.

fooster• 3 years ago

React of course was free.

say_it_as_it_is• 3 years ago

Next.js is a great framework, and its rise in popularity is due in a large part to the return of SEO optimization via Server-Side-Rendering (SSR) within the collective developer conscience.

I stopped reading here because the article may have been made by ChatGPT

NerdiOrg4• 3 years ago

I think the author is mistaken. You can build a PWA, SPA in Next.js and it's even easier than not using it.

I feel like the author is just confused that they're not specifically focusing on SPA because whether anyone wants to admit or not, enterprise companies aren't asking for SPA, or mobile apps, they're asking for headless, static websites. It makes sense that React would respond to those market demands.

mmis10003• 3 years ago

Yes, it's likely react recommend don't do it because to met feature set everyone expect to 'include by default' from bare `react` package today takes way too much effort.

Routing, styling, layout system, animation, data fetching, form validation, i18n, SSR(server side rendering), SSG(static site generation). More and more are expected today. And react by its default offer non of them. And neither react pick a default set that will work by default if you just add them. (Vue or Angular either promote a default set of these or include them by itself, that's a big different with react.)

And integration of library that do these also takes much more time than it used to be because the feature set grows. (Let alone debug why one of combinations didn't work)

Promoting a working default set (A.k.a frameworks) will likely minimize the hassle people need to fight with to get some react app up on the production.

Really, no employer cares about whether you use a react framework or do everything from scratch. If the website isn't online and do what they need. You simply does nothing.

nvln3• 3 years ago

Does anyone else feel that the complexity of the full-stack frameworks is getting untenable?

1. There is a significant gap between dev and production environments. (See #2 why this is critical)

2. The production build times are super high

3. ES modules are great, but the JS ecosystem being a bundle of small libraries, getting them all to play nice is hard.

4. I occasionally get X is included twice errors that are painful to track and debug

5. There are frequent instances where I find out that the very problem I had has been solved by someone, but they don't know how or why. They remove a, b, c then it works. They add it back, it still continues to work.

What happened to KISS?

duncan-donuts• 3 years ago

Late last year I listened to talk on nextjs and I was floored by its design. I still can’t get over that the JS community has embraced file system routing and server rendered stuff. I honestly think I’m taking crazy pills because I could have replaced “nextjs” with “PHP” in most places and it would still make sense.

I have been in software for about a decade and I think I’m experiencing my first complete cycle of “what’s new is old”.

leerob7• 3 years ago

There are similarities to PHP – and I think that's a great thing! I like to think of Next.js as the best parts of PHP / Rails with the powerful UI engine of React. Especially with the new App Router, where you can fetch code inside components like `await db.query()` and soon easily insert/update/delete from the same file as well.

https://beta.nextjs.org/docs/data-fetching/fundamentals

lawkwok• 3 years ago

It’s funny to think there was a time when using JS vs JQuery was the biggest division among devs. Now just using JS is considered the baseline and React is the new framework that people jump to when it isn’t always necessary.

Dylan168072• 3 years ago

Well, when I hear people complain about PHP it's not about the routing or the idea of server-side rendering.

robertoandred4• 3 years ago

Php doesn’t equal file system routing. Look at Wordpress.

bobbylarrybobby• 3 years ago

Noob here. What's wrong with file system routing?

psnehanshu8• 3 years ago

Here's your answer: https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=35220064&goto=item%3Fi...

matijash5• 3 years ago

that's what our goal with wasp[0] is - to abstract the common patterns that keep reappearing and condense them to a configuration choice, while still leaving hatches to write your own code. Still have a way to go (in Beta atm) but I think we managed to demonstrate the basic principle in some instances.

[0]https://wasp-lang.dev/

poyu• 3 years ago

Makes you really wonder why they’re doing this to themselves. Use whatever is most suitable. I try to use as less JS as possible.

gepardi• 3 years ago

What do you typically use?

kypro• 3 years ago

What happened to KISS?

Engineers have to over-engineer to look smart.

Back when I first started working as a software engineer no one gave a crap about good code or best practises. Back then it wasn't uncommon for there to be a few dudes maintaining the website of a large household name business with almost no oversight. I remember it being common for someone entirely untechnical to come over to dev desk and ask for some feature, then you'd find the easiest and quickest way to get that thing live.

Skip to today and we have entire engineering teams with hierarchies, specialities, and accountability – and this is true even in smaller companies.

So imagine you're the lead frontend guy at some company... Are you honestly going to say, "well the site's requirements are kinda simple, so we can probably just build it in HTML and vanilla JS"?

There was a period several years ago where frontend guys writing HTML/CSS and some JQuery were lesser regarded than Java and C# devs. It's why I always pitched myself as a backend guy who knew HTML & JS. But then we got Node, React and TypeScript... Now frontends are so complicated that if you want someone with enough experience to understand how any of it works you need to pay them a decent salary for their knowledge.

root_axis3• 3 years ago

Have you considered the possibility that people aren't as stupid as you think and that these tools actually solve real problems?

nvln3• 3 years ago

What part of my comment suggests that I think people are stupid?

---

Tools can solve important problems "and" increase the complexity to point where they create other problems which makes the trade-off untenable.

danlugo92• 3 years ago

I develop in react and follow KISS and I don't have any problems whatsoever.

Some libraries can be a pain in React Native however, but React web has been smooth sailling for me (following KISS and MVVC).

mythrwy• 3 years ago

Ya but for many cases there is a simpler way with less moving pieces.

React just isn't KISS by nature, or maybe it is KISS for a certain style of problems but not others.

It takes too long and has too many steps to do simple things. If all you are doing is simple things using React isn't KISS.

Here's a tinfoil hat crazy conspiracy theory: Facebook released React and promoted it's uptake to slow down any possible competition's development cycle. (I don't _actually_ believe this of course, but sometimes I do kind wonder).

nvln3• 3 years ago

Yes, using just the FE part is still joyful (Svelte, React etc). It's the move towards full-stack (Next, SvelteKit etc) that I'm slightly complaining about. My complaint is also limited to how complex the build process is in combination with other aspects of the fast moving TS/JS ecosystem.

MonaroVXR2• 3 years ago

Any suggestions for a CMS? Sanity isn't doing it.

cxr• 3 years ago

ES modules are great, but the JS ecosystem being a bundle of small libraries, getting them all to play nice is hard.

Please say "NPM" (and not "JS") when that's what you're talking about.

fendy3002• 3 years ago

If we're talking about react framework (NextJs), then it's the KISS part. Everything is kept simple as react components. Single way to define styles / class, and single way to maintain components: react components.

Using MPA with htmx and only use react on occasional necessity seems better or optimized, but it comes with one limitation: sometimes it's hard to replicate the non-react component / styles in react. Using NextJs removes that limitation.

MonaroVXR2• 3 years ago

What about CMS? Which CMS can you use with it?

d_runs_far• 3 years ago

Here's my realm: We have a react based "framework" that in the end is zipped up and delivered as a SCORM package to be embedded in a Learning Management System. We use React Router to manage navigation.

After a quick scan of the Next docs, all references to routing seem to tie back to server side which is a non starter, as the SCORM is standalone HTML/CSS/JS/Media - that we happen to embellish at run time with some api calls.

This is a case where the pure SPA with no server side is the only way to go; seems like a real pain to go against the default state of Next. Am I wrong and am just missing something? Again, been occasionally looking at next and the like over the past while, but never had time to really dig into into it.

chrisacky• 3 years ago

Do you have an example of the SCORM? I'd love to see how you've structured it? (What's your LMS that you use?)

robertoandred4• 3 years ago

Next doesn’t need a server, you can export to a fully static package. The dynamic server-side features obviously won’t apply, but it otherwise works great.

moritzwarhier• 3 years ago

Yes, for apps that are not hosted publicly or that are not mainly "websites" – what's wrong with just using react + react-router? So I agree that this is an oversight.

Also, there surely are plenty of non-public web-apps in the B2B segment which run in the browser behind a login or on private networks, where SSR is basically unneeded (also, electron and the like)?

But:

for a public web site or commercial web app, I find the take from the first screenshot pretty nuanced.

It is easy to underestimate the complexity of building your own React SSR- or SSG-framework.

I recently tried out vite-plugin-ssr, which kind of does that, in a way that's agnostic to the frontend framework/library.

Can recommend it for people who want neither SPA without SSR nor one of the established React frameworks.

But for people who want to build a full, public-facing website with SSR (which is kind of a requirement for SEO), with minimal friction, I think the recommendation from the docs is absolutely correct, no?

Plain react for single components in otherwise non-React website, full-stack framework if you build the whole site/app in React.

randomopining• 3 years ago

Isn’t it going to get to a point where servers and avg connections are so fast that server side rendering makes sense again?

klysm2• 3 years ago

Probably not because applications will bloat to take up the bandwidth

dwaltrip• 3 years ago

Interesting that CRA isn’t mentioned anymore.

Someone opened an issue to discuss this:

https://github.com/facebook/create-react-app/issues/13072

psnehanshu8• 3 years ago

Yeah, the theo guy

exabrial• 3 years ago

We’ve switched to JSF with Primefaces and a lighter weight BootStrap component toolkit for internal apps.

Server Side Component Frameworks are probably peak developer productivity, at the small cost that they are not infinitely flexible.

Seems like a worthwhile tradeoff when building internal apps or database driven apps.

deepsun2• 3 years ago

I don't understand the fuss about SSR, wasn't that default way of doing websites 10+ years ago, before AJAX? E.g. Apache Struts has all of that Router logic since like 15 years ago, completely server-side.

meotimdihia2• 3 years ago

SSR solves the problem: "the content does not render before your browser download JS."

deepsun2• 3 years ago

Sorry what JS? With aforementioned Apache Struts there's no need for JS to render anything.

But if one wishes, JS can be added, of course (e.g. for DHTML stuff). To avoid render blocking there are "defer" and "async" attributes.

CSDude• 3 years ago

All our application lives behind an authentication except login pages. I still cannot grasp how would I use Nextjs in only SPA mode. Not everything needs to be SSR, I don't want to spare resources, just want to deploy it to S3, put cloudfront infront of it, let 404 requests return index.html and I can use the URLs without #.

SSR should not be a must the docs should reflect that. There is no way I'm paying Vercel 20$ per user for our simple use case or I'm hosting a VM to render pages. I don't care about the improvements SSR would bring in the price of cost, deployment complexity, or any other complexity. Affecting React docs like this to push for SSR does not feel safe to me. I'm happy with my Vite based React TS project.

synergy205• 3 years ago

cant agree more, vercel likes ssr,and it now owns nextjs and svelte,then it forces ssr on the community,it is basically leveraging open source for its own business needs solely, which will not last long if they keep doing this down the road. disappointed.

leerob7• 3 years ago

You can use Next.js in SPA mode – you don't have to use SSR. Here are the current docs (https://nextjs.org/docs/advanced-features/static-html-export) and we're working on an improved version for the new App Router (https://beta.nextjs.org/docs/configuring/static-export) based on community feedback. With this export, can you deploy anywhere you prefer.

cush4• 3 years ago

I never understood where the idea came from that if pages are authenticated, then SSR isn't needed. Maybe because people think the only benefit is SEO. The biggest benefit is performance. SSR is still great to have behind authenticated pages, to improve load times. eg multiple tabs, continuing sessions, etc. There are countless examples of sites that usr SSR + CSR + Auth - Netflix, Github...

psnehanshu8• 3 years ago

The only other benifit of Next.js other than SEO is the project architecture that it provides.

If you are building web apps that live behind auth, it's a no brainer to use CSR. It's easy to deploy, cheaper to host and serve, not harder than SSR to develop. The cons about performance can be solved using code splitting. Moreover with proper caching, the app loads instantly.

Are there new age alternative CRA that provides a scalable project architecture like Next.js provides. Maybe it can come with basic libraries like react-router, react-query, pre installed and Vite pre configured.

phendrenad2• 3 years ago

It sometimes seems like every web framework is run by people who see a minor problem and completely change their project to solve it. Flash back to 2014 when Rails made Turbolinks on by default, and broke everyone's SPAs. Flash back to Angular rewriting in Dart because "it's the future" (it wasn't). Flash back to React replacing the perfectly-fine functional components with hooks (because Vue did it).

And now React is throwing away its backend-agnosticism because they want to hold your hand and make sure you don't fail at SEO and blame React.

mmis10003• 3 years ago

Flash back to React replacing the perfectly-fine functional components with hooks (because Vue did it).

I think the timeline went wrong. React did it first, vue did it latter.

brailsafe2• 3 years ago

and also I think they meant class-based components -> functional components enabled by hooks

cush4• 3 years ago

React replaced class components with functional components and hooks. Class components were awful.

cush4• 3 years ago

React is still backend agnostic

yellowapple• 3 years ago

Was React not already a framework? Are SPAs that use frameworks not SPAs? What even is a framework or SPA anymore?

This shit is why I stick to the backend.

dragonwriter• 3 years ago

Was React not already a framework?

React has usually pitched itself as a library rather than a framework.

eschaton2• 3 years ago

But… they don’t, really. “SPAs” are just a corruption of the web brought about by people who obsess over replacing end user operating systems with HTML+CSS+JavaScript. Most actual users would be just as happy to install a real native application.

psnehanshu8• 3 years ago

And they will be even more happy when they learn that all they need is a web browser to use your app.

thro1• 3 years ago

As a person making what you call "SPAs" since it was possible, first was the minimal amount of data needed to display every next product with use of JS so instant, but then.. rethinked, modularization and being caching friendly (no frames but every replacable part of a page could be as well a page itself - you would call it SPMpA maybe ?) - but the main problem was.. z-index of.. iframes - so you needed to rewrite content elsewhere, with JS, when loaded instead of doing it nicely without it, and finally XMLHttpRequest came from IE - since, any other ways of doing it except with JavaScript are forgotten.

Kind of true the doom came from IE/MS.

New React docs pretend SPAs don't exist anymore

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