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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

#361

Post by ramesh31 »

anonyfox wrote: post #359

Stop a second before you go into RSCs. Whatever you want to achieve ultimately is much easier/quicker/scalable done in real fullstack (or classic web-) frameworks! Rails/Django/Laravel/… + Turbolinks/Htmx/… or even sprinkle some light clientside JS for fancyness. Or go best-of-all-worlds if you happen to know Elixir/Phoenix. But don’t continue the descent into RSCs, now matter how many people tweet about it. These fo…

>These folks with less than 10y industry experience will run into all the basic problems we had in vanilla PHP sites years ago, I even spotted react components with inline-sql-hooks already. This time with much accidental complexity overhead!

So much this. It's like our industry has a rolling 10 year cycle of amnesia. We moved away from server rendered UI for very, very good reasons. Of course the SEO argument is always there, but if that's your concern just build a traditional server templated site. The vast majority of SPAs have zero need for SSR and the complexity that it introduces.

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

#362

Post by ttfkam »

solardev wrote: post #352
ttfkam wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have seen Angular projects last pretty long avoiding code entropy. Angular is opinionated, rigid, and verbose, but goddamn if that structure and predictability don't pay off in the long term.

I'd love to investigate that, honestly. I loved Angular v1 (Angular.js now, I think?) and even that was way cleaner and more opinionated than React. I haven't tried modern Angular in a while. But Next.js reminds me of a lot of the things I loved about early Angular and disliked about raw React (which always was more of a UI lib than a proper framework). Have you tried comparing them in particular?

My most recent use of Angular on a project is using v13 at the moment. I've been doing more infrastructure work lately, and Angular's build times—and bundle sizes—have been a persistent sore spot for me. I keep eyeing v16 jealously since it uses signals, builds A LOT faster, and removes some more boilerplate code in components, and the output assets are pleasantly smaller.

I haven't tried Next.js myself though a coworker was playing with it recently. The amount of components available for React, especially the for-pay libraries, can really decrease time to release. But it's still React. Builds a little slower than Angular 16 at this point, but it's fairly close. You still need to keep a firm hand on the codebase when working on a team to prevent code enmuddification, though less so than plain React. React's (what I consider) extreme amounts of boilerplate for doing anything of consequence is still there though. I also personally prefer Angular's service injection patterns over Reacts explicit imports everywhere.

I'd give them both up in a heartbeat for SvelteKit if I could make a business case for either rewrites or new projects. As it stands, Angular is really good enough and fights code entropy well enough that there isn't a business case there yet.

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

#363

Post by debaserab2 »

recursivedoubts wrote: post #345
DigitalSea wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HTMX is cool, but it's honestly only in the conversation because the developer has leveraged memes and garnered popularity on Twitter.

yeah, i'm not google of facebook or ny times or whatever, i'm a lone dev in montana what other options did i have?

People don't realize that many of the dev tools they use they are using more because of the large marketing reach of those dev tools than any objective decision to use the tool.

Entire companies have been built around the premise of good developer marketing, and if you're faang, you simply get to impose whatever developer trends you want to see in the market.

I'll never forget how wildly popular Stripe became overnight because of how easy their SDK's were - people were happy to give them a higher % of each transaction (all the stripe competitors at the time were cheaper -- this isn't true anymore, but was at the time). It always blew my mind that people were so willing to give up a % of each transaction to save an extra couple days of development.

Developers in general are notoriously susceptible to marketing trends and if you're building a dev tool that you want to gain traction you absolutely have to play that game.

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

#364

Post by bob1029 »

Parts of this thread make me feel like I'm on crazy pills. We are currently doing SSR everywhere and it absolutely works in all the weird bleeding edge use cases that are traditionally parroted as reasons for outsourcing your ownership over technology. This isn't some historical, nostalgic experience for us. It is life today.

The propaganda being fed into this industry is impossible to navigate in 2023. The best I can do is to find other engineers who still see things my way and team up with them. I am so grateful to have a few of these on my team right now.

To be clear - Client-side rendering has its place. A perfect example of this is WebGL. But, this is extremely niche when you consider the total space of all business. PHP-style development is still untouchable for 99% of line-of-business web applications. String interpolation on the server was always the answer. Will continue to be the answer until some dystopian organization(s) decide to make it impossible to do things this way.

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

#365

Post by tacker2000 »

Scarblac wrote: post #105
tacker2000 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea but why do I need to use React for that? Is it because these devs can only do React and nothing else, so we will shoehorn everything into it? I mean, more power to them, if they want to do it and have 10x the complexity and take 10x longer than learning and using normal, already available tools.

React and Server Components are also normal, available tools.

To clarify, I mean other server side tools that have been available a long time and had bugs ironed out. React Server stuff just came out recently, and still has a long way to go i guess.

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

#366

Post by rattlyy »

ramesh31 wrote: post #361
anonyfox wrote: post #359

Stop a second before you go into RSCs. Whatever you want to achieve ultimately is much easier/quicker/scalable done in real fullstack (or classic web-) frameworks! Rails/Django/Laravel/… + Turbolinks/Htmx/… or even sprinkle some light clientside JS for fancyness. Or go best-of-all-worlds if you happen to know Elixir/Phoenix. But don’t continue the descent into RSCs, now matter how many people tweet about it. These fo…

>These folks with less than 10y industry experience will run into all the basic problems we had in vanilla PHP sites years ago, I even spotted react components with inline-sql-hooks already. This time with much accidental complexity overhead! So much this. It's like our industry has a rolling 10 year cycle of amnesia. We moved away from server rendered UI for very, very good reasons. Of course the SEO argument is alw…

"very, very good reasons" bullshit, you do not need to turn landing pages into 30MB react bundles with 20 morbillion node modules

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

#367

Post by ttfkam »

throw1234651234 wrote: post #295
ttfkam wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried SvelteKit yet? I can't say it lacks magic, but that magic is focused on eliminating boilerplate, not hiding where everything is coming from and going to. It is jarring at first when you look at your code and say, "Wait, what else do I need to do?" And there's nothing left. const { count, setCount } = useState(0); becomes let count = 0; There is no more useMemo(…) or useEffect(…). They just don't exist.…

I think you just sold me on Svelte, and I am not joking - I haven't tried it yet, but I want to now.

https://learn.svelte.dev/

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

#368

Post by ricketycricket »

gear54rus wrote: post #289
vitro wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are not your technology.

Im14andthisisdeep :) Did I ever say otherwise? Tools are invented to make things more convenient and not learning them properly is not an excuse to whine.

You are wholesale calling people ignorant over a technology decision.

> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

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

#369

Post by EricMausler »

datavirtue wrote: post #280
sodapopcan wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Please help the guy before he gets too far along. Some of us might have to work with him. Seriously though, I saw someone described as a 22 yr old software engineer in an article. There is a better term: "Software Engineering Apprentice"

Unionize already.

It's not just about wage, it's about assigning appropriate work to peoples level and having them progress through the most efficient steps to mastery while also completing billable hours

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

#370

Post by cultofmetatron »

anonyfox wrote: post #359

Stop a second before you go into RSCs. Whatever you want to achieve ultimately is much easier/quicker/scalable done in real fullstack (or classic web-) frameworks! Rails/Django/Laravel/… + Turbolinks/Htmx/… or even sprinkle some light clientside JS for fancyness. Or go best-of-all-worlds if you happen to know Elixir/Phoenix. But don’t continue the descent into RSCs, now matter how many people tweet about it. These fo…

> Or go best-of-all-worlds if you happen to know Elixir/Phoenix.

THIS... unless you're building something that absolutely requires a full blown progressive rich frontend app, (95% of you don't), liveview will do all the thins using serverside components with minimal jaavscript.

Not just that, you'll have a serverside thread dedicated to that user which allows you to actively push changes to the user's frontend without you having to write explicit javascript handlers.

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