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Things I wish I knew before moving 50K lines of code to React Server Components

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Re: Things I wish I knew before moving 50K lines of code to React Server Components

#241

Post by asynchronous »

renegade-otter wrote: post #219
holoduke wrote: post #125

I think i am getting old. These frameworks are so big and complex. For a simple web hello world you need a huge build and compile pipeline. And now its extended with serverside components. I really wonder what the overhead is. How many of layers of frontend and backend framework code is executed to get the hello world example running. I retreat back to my simple 10kb component framework in which i need only f5 to reb…

This is precisely why you see this move from complexity. The younger devs are beginning to see it. Just like we dumped atrocities like SOAP and XML in favor of simpler and more ergonomic tech, this generation is learning - again - that complexity kills (and makes this job intolerable). Who knows, maybe software development is going to be fun again, even if for a few years before the new batch starts turning it into a…

After kicking and screaming about learning yet another React framework I took the time to build an app fresh in NextJS and it really was a breath of fresh air, felt more like a mature, simpler form of React.

Re: Things I wish I knew before moving 50K lines of code to React Server Components

#242

Post by danjac »

renegade-otter wrote: post #219
holoduke wrote: post #125

I think i am getting old. These frameworks are so big and complex. For a simple web hello world you need a huge build and compile pipeline. And now its extended with serverside components. I really wonder what the overhead is. How many of layers of frontend and backend framework code is executed to get the hello world example running. I retreat back to my simple 10kb component framework in which i need only f5 to reb…

This is precisely why you see this move from complexity. The younger devs are beginning to see it. Just like we dumped atrocities like SOAP and XML in favor of simpler and more ergonomic tech, this generation is learning - again - that complexity kills (and makes this job intolerable). Who knows, maybe software development is going to be fun again, even if for a few years before the new batch starts turning it into a…

It's not happening fast enough. For greenfield projects, new startups, sure.

But the rest of us stuck in legacy-land the toxic waste dumps of these over-engineered behemoths will be with us for years to come.

Re: Things I wish I knew before moving 50K lines of code to React Server Components

#243

Post by matthewmacleod »

holoduke wrote: post #125

I think i am getting old. These frameworks are so big and complex. For a simple web hello world you need a huge build and compile pipeline. And now its extended with serverside components. I really wonder what the overhead is. How many of layers of frontend and backend framework code is executed to get the hello world example running. I retreat back to my simple 10kb component framework in which i need only f5 to reb…

This kind of take really annoys me; your pipeline can be as complex or simple as you need it to be for your specific use-case. If you want to build an application using static file, or a little Makefile that uses a single esbuild command, or a hulking Webpack configuration with 30 plugins – you can easily do any of these in line with the demands and complexity of what you are trying to build.

Also, evaluating tooling based on how easy is is to create a "simple hello world" is only useful if your work involves creating "simple hello world" applications, which it doesn't.

Re: Things I wish I knew before moving 50K lines of code to React Server Components

#244

Post by asynchronous »

alib wrote: post #55

What I love about this is how PHP and JavaScript had basically the same syntax (minus a $ symbol here or a var keyword there), and then NodeJS was like, but we want to run JS on the server! And now, 15 years later JavaScript has finally caught up and it’s basically the same as PHP, but with more acronyms and a steeper learning curve (to be fair, streaming data from server to client components using suspense is cool).…

I personally think PHP’s syntax is miles worse and harder to understand.

Re: Things I wish I knew before moving 50K lines of code to React Server Components

#245

Post by [deleted] »

arthur_sav wrote: post #77
mediumsmart wrote: post #12

In server-side rendering, clients are sent HTML that they can see immediately I noticed this too. You can put a plaintext file on the server and it gets transferred to the browser pretty fast. You can also put another plaintext file ending with .css on the server and it can make things on the first page move and look really nice just because the browser knows what to do with it. It’s a neat trick but still second to…

What is this sorcery you speak of?

[deleted]

Re: Things I wish I knew before moving 50K lines of code to React Server Components

#246

Post by mattmanser »

tmpX7dMeXU wrote: post #88
raphaelcosta wrote: post #29

Doesn’t make any sense for me why we are now using React in the backend, to render HTML… Let’s go back to 10 years ago.

Having a templating system in ‘that environment’ is worth its weight in gold IMO. I’ve been switching between Svelte and Django templates a lot lately, and Svelte just…knowing about the DOM, makes the experience so much nicer. I haven’t come across a non-JS template system that does this. And yes, I was there for PHP and jQuery and whatever.

We've had templating systems on the server-side for many decades?

Do you mean having a javascript templating system maybe? Not really worth it's weight in gold.

Re: Things I wish I knew before moving 50K lines of code to React Server Components

#247

Post by btown »

tomduncalf wrote: post #111

Does anyone know if CSS-in-JS and Context support is planned for RSC, or is there a technical limitation which means they’ll never be possible?

For Context support, https://github.com/vercel/next.js/discussions/42301 isn't promising, and https://twitter.com/sebmarkbage/status/1587615484870098945 explicitly suggests you might need prop drilling.

I'm really sad that tree-specific context for server components seems to be an afterthought. As the Twitter thread suggests, if you have something that can be used across all the server components for an entire request, you can use the cache functionality or rely on Next's URL parameters. But if you've relied on Context as a way to let deeply nested components access some kind of business logic that's specific to only a part of a rendered page, and if you want/need those components to be server components, you'll need to switch to explicitly drilling the props through.

Re: Things I wish I knew before moving 50K lines of code to React Server Components

#248

Post by toddmorey »

DigitalSea wrote: post #207

I'm old enough to remember when servers rendered everything and you used CSS and Javascript to enhance the pages after they were rendered. The web is in such a dark and overengineered place. It's almost unbelievable. It's why my approach to building apps is server-rendered first and then enhanced after the fact.

That’s exactly what this approach (sever components) is for

Re: Things I wish I knew before moving 50K lines of code to React Server Components

#249

Post by sodapopcan »

mediumsmart wrote: post #12

In server-side rendering, clients are sent HTML that they can see immediately I noticed this too. You can put a plaintext file on the server and it gets transferred to the browser pretty fast. You can also put another plaintext file ending with .css on the server and it can make things on the first page move and look really nice just because the browser knows what to do with it. It’s a neat trick but still second to…

My brother just started learning web development this past year and his mind was blown when I told him you could send HTml over HTtp.

Re: Things I wish I knew before moving 50K lines of code to React Server Components

#250

Post by lifechoseme123 »

matthewmacleod wrote: post #243
holoduke wrote: post #125

I think i am getting old. These frameworks are so big and complex. For a simple web hello world you need a huge build and compile pipeline. And now its extended with serverside components. I really wonder what the overhead is. How many of layers of frontend and backend framework code is executed to get the hello world example running. I retreat back to my simple 10kb component framework in which i need only f5 to reb…

This kind of take really annoys me; your pipeline can be as complex or simple as you need it to be for your specific use-case. If you want to build an application using static file, or a little Makefile that uses a single esbuild command, or a hulking Webpack configuration with 30 plugins – you can easily do any of these in line with the demands and complexity of what you are trying to build. Also, evaluating tooling…

I agree.

One can choose to limit complexity. Nothing is stopping a personal from building things with html, css, and vanilla js.

Think of XHR -> Ajax -> Fetch API or others (Axios).

No one is stopping you from writing out a 20 line XHR request. You can also write a 2 line Axios (or some other XHR-wrapper library) request.

After I took the time study webpack (a day) or reactjs (a month) for example, I really appreciated the options webpack brought (code related plugins), and the structure reactjs brought to my project.

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