The Epic Stack

But the whole modern development it's a nightmare as I see, or at least the advertised modern serverless development, you need to depend on:

- Some serverless hosting - Some database provider - Some auth provider - Some other service, etc

In the past you just rented a simple VPS or shared hosting, setup all by yourself and have just one provider for everything, nowadays I read that auth it's very hard and you should not do it and instead use some auth provider (Auth0, etc).

I remember the good old days with php, just upload your file and it worked, now they try to replicate that experience but with dozens of providers.

I would recommend to use just good old database client and send your queries as text, nothing it's easier than that, every orm struggles when you want to do some relatively complex query, I struggled to do something like this with kysely `LEFT JOIN table2 ON (table1.id = tabl2.id AND table2.status = 1` was insane how complicated it was, sure you can pass raw sql, but what's the point of the orm then.

Remix is _really_ great if you want a traditional web application. In the tutorial they (used to?) do a bait and switch on you where at one point you realize no client side JavaScript has been running the entire time because the tutorial hadn't even talked you through how to bundle in the client side js! The idea is pretty much, use the platform.

Of course, I'm building a web app on top of it, so I want a lot of features that "the platform" doesn't necessarily support very well without client-side js to facilitate everything. And I did make an honest go of it. To me, the biggest pain point is still forms and form validation, which is notoriously painful in React land. I'm ultimately using react-hook-form and running the same schema validator client-side and server-side, which means I'm not really "using the platform" in that respect. I'd love to see an official react-hook-form type solution added to Remix.

Still, the framework has some really great, sticky conventions and it feels like they thought of almost everything. For example, the "action" and "loader" convention is awesome, nested layouts are the bomb, they encourage filenames like .server.ts to differentiate between things that can't be run client-side, heavily encourage the use of a bunch of goodies from react-router (which most people probably don't know exist) because Remix's routing is built on top of react-router... And so on.

Having used both Next.js and Remix a few times, it's difficult for me to recommend one definitively over the other; if you aren't experienced with them either one will be a learning curve. In general, I think Remix is the better framework but some shortcomings in the documentation (e.g. I found out about some new routing conventions because the old ones weren't working for me and it was confusing because the tutorial and docs seemed to use the old ones) and the relative dearth of resources online can lead to frustration. This should pretty much be a non-issue if you start a new project with one of the "stacks" that someone has developed, the blessed ones of which give you a base project that already has database, authentication, tailwinds etc configured with example routes and components.

Next is already taking some of the good ideas from Remix (nested layouts still in beta I think), and has a pretty extensive and mature ecosystem with lots of answers on SO and blogs at this point. For example, if you want free social auth you're pretty much just going to install next-auth. Still don't know exactly what I'd do in Remix for that.

The non-serverless version still works fine, even in modern JS land. The simple approach still works if you have some knowledge around setting up a server and configuring a few things.

I also think that the advice around Authentication is often misguided. For simple cases it's not that hard to add authentication without a separate service. There is too much scaring the newbies around that topic, when they are probably about as likely to mess up authentication when they try to configure an excessively complex library compared to implementing basic session authentication with the tools their framework provides.

I’ll stick to rails, batteries included everything with easy to follow conventions. “It’s time to just ship” and proceeds to list like 15 different things, just lol. JavaScript must cause brain damage or something.

Hell, even LAMP is a better “just ship” than this monstrosity.