Migrating from Vue 2 to Svelte

I like React and I'll admit that I resisted React at first, mainly due to JSX and workflow purposes. We had teams that could do CSS/HTML very well and those that were more capable in JS. There was a gap in skills. And taking the design files into HTML/CSS, testing the bulk of it and THEN adding dynamic functionality and JS was a good flow.

This was also many years ago, where we had - let's build apps mainly with HTML/CSS and sprinkle in some JS framework sugar and dynamic capability on the client side. Ok, Angular/Ember and then Vue worked VERY well. We made a hop from jQuery to more sophistication but still easy to read and develop compelling and maintainable, interactive frontends. Then we did SPAs which worked well for a few things but were vastly oversold.

React came along which was nice, but early on, it was not needed for many projects even though many devs started implementing it.

We had a demand for more rich web apps and they got MORE complex and dynamic. We decided, maybe we shouldn't sprinkle in all these sugary JS framework tags and corresponding logic in our HTML.

Then we had a ton more university-educated programmers entering the frontend scene that used to just be comprised of a megaton of jQuery heroes (no offense, they got shit done and went out to lunch most days while the more sophisticated frontend devs went hardcore on semantic HTML/CSS, VanillaJS, spending countless hours on browser bugs and QA cycles and using divs to render tabular data for fun/ego?).

We also got more interest in React from non full-time frontend devs (ex: fullstack and even backend devs) that were like, hey building frontend doesn't suck like it used to in VanillaJS! Count me in!

Coupled with the Stackoverflow copy-paste dev era and the nightmarish third party library upgrade scenarios... now we have a TON of shitty React codebases and people have, and will, migrate away from them. This cycle I'm describing gives rise to challengers like Svelte.

I like React (and React Native), but the many codebases I've inherited have not been good. In fact, I've probably inherited as many decent React codebases as decent jQuery codebases but what does that say? Not much because I haven't inherited many good examples of either.

I'll still choose inheriting a shitty React project over a shitty jQuery project any day. Great progress has been made (although you could argue much of the progress was in cross-browser standards and advancements in browser technology).

But I still feel like the truth that everything that is old becomes new again cannot be avoided.

And in that - it's web components and/or more HTML sprinkled JS frameworks for the win to me. I haven't used Svelte, although some on my team like it, but it looks like a return to a get-shit-done dynamic websites/apps framework.

And I'll likely still continue using React for larger, more rich and dynamic apps that require a larger dev team.

> so are less religious and more intentional about their tech choices.

The sentence I would use is "less pragmatic and more interested in hacking than being productive".

I know people like to dump React devs for being fanatics and I have encountered some of those people... Like, 2 maybe. The rest of us use React because we want a battle tested framework with a huge community.

I don't want to hack around with the cool new framework. I don't find frameworks exciting. I want to build stuff that I do find exciting and I want the framework to be in the background supporting that. I want to be able to find support when I need it and high quality prebuilt extensions for as much of the functionality my app needs as possible so that I'm not spending my days rebuilding basic components. That's why I choose React.

https://component-party.dev/ speak for itself.

Have you considered open sourcing the component library? I feel like lack of this kind of tooling is one of the main things holding Svelte back.

> SSR first applications and might likely think about using a light weight framework like Svelte for a client rendered 'feature (or) two' like I did.

Rich Harris called this "transitional apps" :) See this excellent talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=860d8usGC0o

There's now active work to finally let you build whatever you need from a single code: be it MPA SPA, or anything in between, seamlessly. Including things like "everything is SSR'ed except this specific part of the page". Svelte, Solid.js, Astro are all rapidly moving the state of the art towards that goal.

> Is not made clear upfront and that there's no intention to fix it.

IIRC the idea is to remove web components from the core eventually, and have them as a third/first-party add-on. Can't find the relevant tweets right now, so don't quote me on that :D

> What about web components first framework like Lit[1]?

Their SSR support is listed as experimental: https://lit.dev/docs/ssr/overview/ with multiple issues (see the end of the page).

There's a reason for that: web components in general cannot be SSR'ed. That is, you cannot take a random web component and have it SSRed. You have to do very specific manual hacks or very library/framework-specific/bundler hacks to make them work. See this excellent article for details: https://css-tricks.com/using-web-components-with-next-or-any...