YES! YES! I FEEL SO SEEN RIGHT NOW! I find this behavior unbelievably frustrating. It's hard for me to understand why they ever even shipped RSC's without fixing this.
I just don't understand the use-case either.
Either you're building an SEO-optimized website and you want that initial page load to be as fast as possible. In this case, just build a static website. Use whatever technology you desire and compile to HTML+CSS.
Or you're building an "app" in which case you should expect users to linger around for a bit and that fat initial payload will eventually be cached, so you really don't need to sending it down on every click. So go full-on with the client-side rendering and simplify your stack a little. You can still do a lot of optimizations like code-splitting and prefetching and this and that, but we don't need this weird mixed modality where some things work in one place but not the other.
Which is pretty much what the author says and I'm glad to see people start to realize this.
I wish companies would take this a step further still and just build a PWA. This gives you access to so many web APIs that can further simplify your stack.
I agree that it's bewildering to see how many companies reach for Nextjs for webapps that don't need SEO optimization but some of the more complex rendering strategies can still be useful for web apps as well. Even for PWAs
Where we have a need for server side, nodejs just never felt natural for us so we stuck with java springboot or flask/fastapi as appropriate.
Thought I've enjoyed the code-splitting and access to SPA/SSR/SSG/etc strategies that come with the "framework" mode
I think part of it is that the web developer community exploded. More developers = more people trying to make their mark = more churn. Everyone wants to be the person who "fixed React" or "reimagined routing."
But when you're actually building a product that users depend on, you realize how much of a tax this is. Every framework "upgrade" that breaks things is time NOT spent on features, user feedback, or actual problems.
The irony is that the best products are often built with "boring" tech that just works. Instagram ran on Django for years at massive scale. Basecamp is still Rails. These teams focused on users, not on having the hottest stack.
What frameworks/tools have you found that stayed stable and just worked over the years?
Nyes. The biggest innovation in the past 5 years has been routers that can coordinate loading data because they’re perfectly positioned to know what you’re about to access.
This is a hard problem that we’ve been solving forever. It feels like super tedious formulaic work to write an optimized SQL query or series of API requests that fetches all the necessary data with the fewest possible lookups. So we try to automate it with a sufficiently smart compiler of some sort. Query planners inside a database, ORMs, graphql, routers, memory managing compilers, it’s all chasing the same dream – what if the computer Just Knew the quickest way to grab just the right amount of data.
Anybody passing by please share too
Is Wouter better in this regard?
mayaj47•4h ago