Issue #28: Ready or Not
🎶 Here I come, you can’t hide, gonna find you and make you want me… 🎶
Some weeks bring really impressive amounts of updates in the metaframeworks world. Just recently I lamented that summer is too peaceful and calm, and now August is getting really hot, presumably preparing for September’s back-to-school madness. Let’s see what webdev fireworks the last week has brought to us.
The Good
In the previous issue I had mentioned the nice tradition of coming up with a monthly summary of ecosystem updates adopted by some open source maintainers. And I had totally missed the awesome version of it from the Svelte team. One of the updates specifically related to SvelteKit is the remote functions feature. There was a lot of work dedicated to making that happen, and this possibility of separating application concerns even more in full-stack SvelteKit web apps gives a lot of room for imagination and technical creativity. One of the reasons for (and enablements from) remote functions was in-app communication safety and security, and Rich Harris had made a thorough breakdown of some details of this aspect on Bluesky. All in all, it’s one of the most interesting and exciting metaframework features lately, so worth attention and playing with (and updating your SvelteKit apps where you feel it applicable).
In a similar vein, Daishi Kato, the creator of Waku, announced the new feature of his metaframework — slices (and lazy slices). The concept is largely inspired by Gatsby’s (RIP!) slices and provides developers with primitives similar to “islands” or “deferrable views” from other frameworks with some Waku-specific architectural details.
And last but not least in the list — a sneak peek into Fresh 2, Deno’s Preact-based metaframework’s future release, in the article by Kitson P. Kelly. And even though there aren’t many new exciting features planned for that, it’s still nice to see the work happening, as you can expect a good amount of innovation from the awesome Deno team.
Fresh 2, at this stage, feels like more of a maintenance release where the underpinnings have been invested in, some of which mandate pretty material shifts to migrate from Fresh 1 to Fresh 2 without any major new features or capabilities.
The Bad
Alex Petros of htmx (providing pretty decent credibility for the topic I’m gonna announce) gave a talk with a perturbing (for us, frontend engineers) title: “What’s Left for Frontend Engineers?” (with the accompanying TL;DR post for those of us who are into skimming reading). The web UI plumbing remnants that he predicts will keep us busy in the nearest years are a bit disappointing, but on the other hand, these observations confirm my (obvious for this newsletter) theory of metaframeworks getting a hold on the web dev of the 21st century (everyone in media has the right for bold prophecies). So if you’re a zealous frontend developer, consider smoothing your “T”-shaped knowledge to “t” or some other (more ramified) character.
And while you do that, and get overwhelmed and panicked by the amount of choice, remember that nobody, even the most clever guys, even the framework creators and maintainers, know everything and can have a clear idea of what to do and how to do it. For instance, the RedwoodSDK team, having split up with Redwood GraphQL several months ago, tries to promote the repo at all costs (congrats on the ⭐1k milestone! 🎉). And one funny way they do it is something new to me — posting ads into/as the release/tag of another repo (the very Redwood GraphQL). Is it weird? Definitely so. Is it worth it? Probably, but arguably. Anyway, now I know one more thing about open-source guerrilla marketing, thanks guys!
The Noteworthy
The Astro team, prolific as usual, has released the new minor 5.13 (they call it “Lucky” in the hope of getting away from the nemesis of doom) with some nuggets like multiple sitemaps and enums in Astro DB tables. Honestly, why would anyone use anything else (for static websites at least) in 2025?!
BTW, for some shameful reasons Astro is missing from the list of participants in the new beginning from GitHub (which is just an identity-less part of some minor MS department now I guess, but still) — GitHub Secure Open Source Fund. This fund includes all the cool guys from the metaframeworks scene now — Next, Nuxt, and Svelte, and it sounds like a good addition to all the investment these projects get lately.
All in all, the amount of positivity and inventions of all sorts in the industry is increasing (coinciding with the amount of OpenAI tokens consumed globally, but… nuh…) and it gives hope for better outcomes for all of us, metaframeworks users. Or, in the worst case scenario, will present a couple of satisfied smirks to metaframeworks skeptics. We’re gonna have fun inevitably anyway, so stay tuned!
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