Issue #30: Fresh Feeling

🎶 Birds singing a song, old paint is peeling, this is that fresh, that fresh feeling… 🎶

The last week brought Autumn and a lot of fresh air to the metaframeworks ecosystem, and luckily there were not many falls on the way. We’re back to the neverending technological school, so let’s get to learning from the latest and greatest in the metaframework world and its amazing habitats that never stop grinding and crunching toward technological perfection.

The Good

Marvin Hagemeister has declared that after dozens of alpha releases for version 2.0 Fresh, one of the most performant and interesting (in terms of technology choices) metaframeworks, gets beta status for v2 and you can play with that in a more stable way. Based on Deno, Fresh now gets Vite integration providing the tool with all the corresponding benefits, including access to the Environment API embraced by lots of developers and tooling providers.

The architecture is now stable, and the last big change has landed.

With hot reloading inside islands allowing to work with component polishing much faster, build times squeezed tenfolds, magical react aliasing (Fresh uses Preact, winning my heart forever), and other improvements for DX, Fresh becomes a great candidate for your next big thing. And if you’re already in the Fresh camp, v1-to-v2 migration shouldn’t be a big deal (though the migration guide seems to be broken a bit yet). For me personally, this metaframework (along with Deno itself) was always an example of simple and straightforward (yet powerful) innovation without hype and with sane technological choices bringing lots of goodies for developers.

Another metaframework particularly generous for dev goodies is SvelteKit, and as I mentioned before, one of the latest big things from Rich Harris and the gang was the remote functions feature. While it’s fully aligned with SvelteKit philosophy, the mechanics might be confusing for some developers so awesome guy Simon Holthausen made the cool video for the Svelte Society YouTube channel with a detailed walkthrough over the remote functions’ ins and outs and a simple example of usage. The approach simplifies a lot asynchronous communication between client and server for developers so if simplifying your dev life and finding peace for your soul is something you seek, check out the feature and the insightful walkthrough.

The Bad

But if you don’t like simplification and calmness, you still have Next.js. Just kidding — Next.js is awesome, and it’s definitely the piece of technology you cannot ignore if you develop UIs with React, especially in the era of AI. And to make it even more comfortable Vercel decided to come up with the OpenSDK initiative to loosen coupling between the company’s open-source products and other ecosystems. With the Vercel’s strategy of gathering many other metaframework teams under its wing, the OpenSDK may give unified tooling approach for developers working not only with Next.js and React, but also with SvelteKit/Svelte, Nuxt/Vue, and potentially other frameworks too.

Developers respond with high loyalty to such initiatives and the Vercel’s innovations in general, like, for instance, in this blogpost after Mahdi Jazini full of love and appreciation. And even though it’s accompanied by ridiculously high amount of bot-like comments, it still indicates the presence of huge army of fans and supporters, meaning the company does perfect in developer relations and other vendors can learn a lot from them.

Except for the security part, probably, which, supported by the ubiquitous nature of the Next.js tooling ecosystem, still leaves some room for improvements. As it usually happens, caching and middleware are the weak links in the metaframework’s tooling chain — not exclusively (though predominantly) for Next.js. Check out the concise overview of the vulnerabilities from the Netlify team who, as usual, does exceptional work of safeguarding developers on their infrastructure side.

The Noteworthy

Summer is gone (🥲) but we have a lot of stuff to remember, including a lot of notable updates from Vite, correspondingly noted in the official August summary blogpost from Alexander Lichter and Michael Dong. The team delivered new features for Oxlint (arguably the ESLint killer), support for RSC, visual regression testing in Vitest, improvements for build tools (Rolldown and Oxc), and lot more. The article contains interesting links to community resources related to the whole ecosystem so you definitely should check that out.

Nuxt guys had released new minor version 4.1 for the metaframework with overwhelmingly huge set of auxiliary improvements for developer experience making me look with scorn at my projects with other metaframeworks where I didn’t even know such possibilities could theoretically exist.

Meanwhile, RedwoodSDK team had jumped forward publishing several new releases (v0.2, v0.3, and “kids”) with something that looks like a finish line to a major release, but I can be wrong — time will show.

All in all, September has started with a good wave of metaframeworks tooling updates, and I am eager to see what comes next — it is the time of innovation and communication (with lots of regular and new developer conferences scheduled for the coming weeks and months) that we are all here for, so let’s stock up all our curiosity and empathy and look forward to the news.

👋