Why frameworks?

[veganaize]

Why already worrying about frameworks? Why not just go vanilla and build up from there? 🍦

[ykdojo]

I'm just familiar with Next.js + Tailwind, but I have nothing against vanilla. Open to ideas

[veganaize]

Maybe starting with pure HTML & CSS (possibly using Tailwind) and see how far it can go --without losing control, of course-- like that?

HTML, followed by CSS, are the quickest for a browser to render. To my knowledge they can be processed in parallel, across multiple threads.

I don't know about anyone else, but I'm about over websites which render & react more slowly than those of last century. Most of the trade-offs seem to comfort the developer, over the end user, not to mention the potential pollution caused by millions of such bloated apps?

[ykdojo]

The only challenge with pure HTML, CSS & JS is integrating with Supabase or any other backend that we decide to use.

Assuming we use either Supabase or Firebase for it, we'll need to load data from there and render it.

I believe with Next.js, we can render them on the server side, so that should work well.

I guess another alternative is to build a monolithic web app with something like Rails or Django, but I'm not quite interested in doing that for this particular project.

[veganaize]

Supabase supports vanilla access.

Server side rendering definitely sounds like the right approach, at least initially. But why is a 3rd-party framework necessary to do so? It seems like a roughly equal amount of vanilla could also do the trick (server-side via Node)? The pages could simply be served as regular pre-rendered HTML/CSS/JS pages...

I wrote a little proof-of-concept, in Node.js, demonstrating how vanilla (no Express) can very efficiently serve pages and all of the code fits within a single screen of an old school (80x24) terminal.

Thanks for entertaining these thoughts!

[ykdojo]

So Node, Rails, Django, or anything else - I'm just not excited about the idea of working with any of them, tbh.

Again, it's a combination of the fact that I'm more familiar with Next.js, and also the fact that I'm not excited about the idea of making and managing our own backend.

I totally see your point, though.

[veganaize]

Gotcha. Sorry, I'd thought you were already using node on the backend.

[subhoghoshX]

I'm personally against vanilla. It's like being a masochist. If we're too much into performance or JS file size, we can go for something like Astro. But I think NextJS holds a nice balance between performance and developer experience :)

[veganaize]

By vanilla I mean as little 3rd-party frameworks as possible, within reason, unless empirically justified. Can you offer any substantial evidence as to why vanilla is masochistic? How much (single-threaded) Javascript does a site like this really need, anyway?

Thank you for your thoughts.

[pushkaraj2007]

I think vanilla JS is good for small projects, and it's recommended in that situation.

But I think it's going to be complex project with lots of pages and content, so it makes our life easier as a developer, that's why frameworks are recommended in this situation.

What do you think @ykdojo ?

[ykdojo]

I think I've explained most of my thoughts here: #18 (comment)

[veganaize]

I don't see what's going to be so complex about this project. Piles of frameworks feel like complexity to me. But I know I'm the extreme minority and that most people are used to learning frameworks instead of markup & programming languages.