Issue #27: Summer Moved On

🎵 Handshakes unfold and the way it goes, no one knows… 🎵

When I had looked around a couple of weeks ago and discovered it’s Summer already, I decided to take a week off and chill out building a new wooden gazebo instead of metaframework-based applications. I expected a lavish flow of the ecosystem updates on my return but alas, I didn’t miss much. A new (blazing-fast!) JS framework here and there, some chili opinions (SPAs are dead again, of course) from a daring disruptor, and a couple of minor but interesting releases by worker bees from Hono (which is becoming suspiciously easier to roll out at Vercel’s) and from React Router, and that’s it. So I was even considering to cancel this issue and prolong my holidays (because I can!) but then I found that… Although it’s Summer, the laziest time of the year, there’s always something more to say and even celebrate. So let’s check that out.

The Good

There were two events lately worthy of a good bottle of scotch for some and an amplitude eyeroll for others.

The first is the HTML day 2025, which (to my embarrassment) I knew nothing about after a couple of decades in this business. For three years in a row, it’s a day to gather IRL in places around the world to write and learn HTML (which some of us call “the job” but anyways). Unfortunately, the places where I hangout usually were not in the list so I made a note to myself to organize something the next year. This is an awesome community initiative and a good reason to learn something new about things you thought you knew like the back of your hand.

The second is another yearly initiative which is much more famous I believe – the Stack Overflow’s Developer Survey (the results I mean, not the boring part). To be quite frank, I hate surveys and don’t consider their output to be something meaningful nor representative in any way. But even though the amount of participants is declining gradually each year (thanks to smartphones for shortening our attention span!) and all the categories are dotted with irrelevant AI euphoria (to the unreadable extent), the SO survey is still popular and it’s a good conversational icebreaker for social media (and IRL events, like the one mentioned above). So many communities on the web had something to celebrate this year (those who were able to derive something from the confusing infographics, I guess – or at least interpret them their way).

The Bad

I mentioned the Nuxt evolution before already and there was a lot of confusion around that, which is always bad. But luckily, such nice person as Daniel Roe works on the public acceptance of it all and honestly does a great job for that. The last week Podrocket podcast published the episode with him where the guys discussed all the details of the NuxtLabs acquisition by Vercel, reasons and the results of that, as well as the future plans of the team and the community.

Even though there are some concerns among developers on the ecosystem generalization, this movement is probably inevitable and framework authors try to reuse best solutions in the industry. So the Waku’s Daishi Kato announced that the framework is moving to Vite’s official RSC plugin leaving Waku a minimal API layer getting rid of some complex infrastructural parts. We’ll see what this basement unification brings for the tools like Waku. To me personally this skin-level individuality feels like depriving the metaframeworks market of competition slightly decreasing the innovation aspect, but who knows.

At least in such scenarios we can focus more on such important aspects of developer work as security. And here I found a nice recent conversation from the HTML All The Things podcast guys on this topic. It gives some sneak peeks on security across the whole web dev stack so if you’re still thinking where to start your security improvements journey, it can be a very helpful overview.

And if you’re security guru already and want something more niche to surprise you, check out this interesting Next.js security approach (this metaframework really needs fresh ideas on that) from Rohan Chaturvedi – very practical and detailed.

The Noteworthy

I love the practice of monthly news posts from the Astro team. They didn’t disappoint anyone this July and came up with the awesome list of the metaframework awesomeness again in their “What’s new in Astro – July 2025” post and the corresponding newsletter issue (cheers to my Buttondown neighbours!). But interestingly, I also stumbled upon the similar list of ecosystem updates from the Vite team, which is cool as this tradition is something every framework and tool should steal to provide fans with the latest and the greatest news and innovations related to the specific technologies. For instance, the examples of projects built with Astro bring a lot of inspiration to me as a frequent metaframework user. So this community appreciation practice is something truly going a long way.

What could and should get into such community lists? Something like this post about Svelte 5 mental model for instance, which blew my mind and made me feel old and dumb but excited at the same time. Is there a lot of that? You wouldn’t even believe me…

So as you can see, the summertime is not that boring in the metaframeworks land and there’s still something to watch for and something interesting to expect and learn. I’m 100% sure most of the framework developers are cooking something to the regular September innovation ball. But meanwhile, let’s have some chills and enjoy old and new fun and handy ways to build for the Web. Because that’s why we’re here.

👋