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Yes, I was pulled in by this being a "full stack" technology and half-read, half-skimmed the article looking for how the back-end parts work. I came away with t

by davedx 5y ago

Yes, I was pulled in by this being a "full stack" technology and half-read, half-skimmed the article looking for how the back-end parts work. I came away with the impression that sveltekit provides some kind of thin layer on top of express to do things like server-side rendering, so still very view-level focused. I have the same issue with all these fancy "JAM-stack-ish" technologies like next, nuxt, vercel, etc, etc, etc. They are constantly iterating on the front end and its associated DX, which overall is a net good I think, but almost completely ignoring the back-end concerns. Contrast with, say, meteor. Meteor came out in what, 2014 or something? And gave you a genuine full-stack development experience. There's not really been anything like it ever since. Weird.

nefitty 5y ago
I just want to take a second to share that Next.js is the worst thing I've ever used in my life. I am a react dev. They somehow managed to make Next.js harder for me to use than Django, which is in Python, which I've barely ever touched! Imagine that react is like an airplane dashboard. Next.js is like adding a faceplate to the dashboard, jumbling up the buttons, then hiding some buttons because "best practice" and "optimization".
- ylyn 5y ago
  Next.js is an opinionated React framework. If you don't agree with the choices it makes, don't use it.
  - nefitty 5y ago
    It's an amalgamation of opinions, yeah, and they somehow all result in slightly worse and worse dx.
    - true_religion 5y ago
      Like what for example?
      - nefitty 5y ago
        Whitelists for network requests. Config files. Favoring a server even for a simple SPA. Hidden documentation pages: "Theres some stuff that no one ever uses but I guess click here if you want to see it."
kirso 5y ago
There must be a reason though why a lot of companies are actually using this stack these days with SPAs and it seems like front-end is kind of merging with back-end by using the server-side rendering and server-less DBs with Prisma for instance? Its actually just interesting to observe. I am a complete newbie but curious what are the seniors here think about this trend overall. Meteor had to be sold in the end since they didn't get the adoption. But the "JAM-stack-ish" frameworks do get that adoption recently at least based on the funding rounds (kind of half serious here).
- dham 5y ago
  I just take that as a difference in the times. Meteor was from another era in development. We mainly did server side stuff and used backbone, knockout etc to do more complex interactions. Or just used javascript/jquery. Why would I use Meteor when I had Rails, Django, etc that was much more mature. It's different now because developers like more pain these days. A lot of developers say that it's because the customer demands more, the interactions need to be better. None of that is the case in reality. The customer doesn't really care and at the end of the day most of these frontend framework users produce a worse experience unfortunately. High CPU, uncaught errors, poor messages, optimistic update bugginess, etc.
  - danjac 5y ago
    IIRC Meteor also shot itself in the foot by using MongoDB as the default storage, at a time when there was deep (deserved) scepticism about the reliability of MongoDB.
lovasoa 5y ago
> sveltekit provides some kind of thin layer on top of express It doesn't use express, but something named polka [1], which is much less mature. Bugs in polka have caused downtime and remote DOS vulnerabilities in my sveltekit app multiple times. [1] https://github.com/lukeed/polka https://github.com/lukeed/polka
- zffr 5y ago
  Well actually SvelteKit has a concept of “adapters” which can bundle your app for different targets (ex: netlify, vercel, or node). If you target running your app on a node server, polka might be the default but it is trivial to replace with express
  - lovasoa 5y ago
    No, the "node" adapter only allows using polka. Unless you develop your own adapter, you are stuck with it.
    - zffr 5y ago
      Check out the docs: https://github.com/sveltejs/kit/tree/master/packages/adapter-node https://github.com/sveltejs/kit/tree/master/packages/adapter... They even show you how to set up an express server
      - lovasoa 5y ago
        You are right, I didn't know that it exported a raw handler you could use from another server.
  - andrew_ 5y ago
    The issue lies more with the fact that most users will use what's shipped as default. You see that habit in every large framework out there. And that's why it's important to ship reliable, stable defaults.
    - 5y ago

by davedx 5y ago

nefitty 5y ago

I just want to take a second to share that Next.js is the worst thing I've ever used in my life. I am a react dev. They somehow managed to make Next.js harder for me to use than Django, which is in Python, which I've barely ever touched! Imagine that react is like an airplane dashboard. Next.js is like adding a faceplate to the dashboard, jumbling up the buttons, then hiding some buttons because "best practice" and "optimization".

ylyn 5y ago
Next.js is an opinionated React framework. If you don't agree with the choices it makes, don't use it.
- nefitty 5y ago
  It's an amalgamation of opinions, yeah, and they somehow all result in slightly worse and worse dx.
  - true_religion 5y ago
    Like what for example?
    - nefitty 5y ago
      Whitelists for network requests. Config files. Favoring a server even for a simple SPA. Hidden documentation pages: "Theres some stuff that no one ever uses but I guess click here if you want to see it."

kirso 5y ago

There must be a reason though why a lot of companies are actually using this stack these days with SPAs and it seems like front-end is kind of merging with back-end by using the server-side rendering and server-less DBs with Prisma for instance? Its actually just interesting to observe. I am a complete newbie but curious what are the seniors here think about this trend overall. Meteor had to be sold in the end since they didn't get the adoption. But the "JAM-stack-ish" frameworks do get that adoption recently at least based on the funding rounds (kind of half serious here).

dham 5y ago
I just take that as a difference in the times. Meteor was from another era in development. We mainly did server side stuff and used backbone, knockout etc to do more complex interactions. Or just used javascript/jquery. Why would I use Meteor when I had Rails, Django, etc that was much more mature. It's different now because developers like more pain these days. A lot of developers say that it's because the customer demands more, the interactions need to be better. None of that is the case in reality. The customer doesn't really care and at the end of the day most of these frontend framework users produce a worse experience unfortunately. High CPU, uncaught errors, poor messages, optimistic update bugginess, etc.
- danjac 5y ago
  IIRC Meteor also shot itself in the foot by using MongoDB as the default storage, at a time when there was deep (deserved) scepticism about the reliability of MongoDB.

lovasoa 5y ago

> sveltekit provides some kind of thin layer on top of express It doesn't use express, but something named polka [1], which is much less mature. Bugs in polka have caused downtime and remote DOS vulnerabilities in my sveltekit app multiple times. [1] https://github.com/lukeed/polka https://github.com/lukeed/polka

zffr 5y ago
Well actually SvelteKit has a concept of “adapters” which can bundle your app for different targets (ex: netlify, vercel, or node). If you target running your app on a node server, polka might be the default but it is trivial to replace with express
- lovasoa 5y ago
  No, the "node" adapter only allows using polka. Unless you develop your own adapter, you are stuck with it.
  - zffr 5y ago
    Check out the docs: https://github.com/sveltejs/kit/tree/master/packages/adapter-node https://github.com/sveltejs/kit/tree/master/packages/adapter... They even show you how to set up an express server
    - lovasoa 5y ago
      You are right, I didn't know that it exported a raw handler you could use from another server.
- andrew_ 5y ago
  The issue lies more with the fact that most users will use what's shipped as default. You see that habit in every large framework out there. And that's why it's important to ship reliable, stable defaults.
  - 5y ago