Issue #35: Crazy Train
FOMO is strong in the metaframeworks-driven world. Partly because it’s JavaScript — a language some say was created out of FOMO. Mostly, though, it’s the fast pace of ecosystem development, especially in this crazy AI era. FOMO drives and feeds the hype train, and unfortunately metaframeworks, being a medley of everything hypey in the modern tech world, are often playing catch-up. There are good parts to it, like continuous improvement and innovation, and there are bad parts and side effects too, like attracting the wrong folks with the wrong intentions. Let’s see if we were able to find a balance over the last fortnight.
The Good
Syntax podcast regularly brings tasty treats for web developers, metaframework fiends included. The show is one of the pillars of modern webdev thought leadership and is either responsible for so many hype train launches in recent years or has done its part in adding steam to them by putting some FOMO coal into the engine. There’s nothing wrong with that — it’s how media work — so I always listen with (a bit sceptical but still) curiosity. Several recent episodes were dedicated to metaframeworks topics and welcomed some great metaframeworks people, so there’s a whole bunch of hours of audio content for your inquisitive ears.
In the first of them, Wes and Scott took a look at the weird new kid on the metaframeworks block – Remix 3. After a pompous introduction, another new reincarnation of Remix (not a React Router flavour this time) drew some FOMO attention and was therefore dug into by Syntax. If you want a clean and simple look (as opposed to the multi-hour official presentation), definitely check out this concise sneak peek.
The next interesting episode was dedicated to discussing TanStack Start, the long-anticipated TanStack-based and TanStack-driven metaframework from Tanner Linsley. This one is much more straightforward, less esoteric, and is a predictably well-engineered piece of software with lots of advanced techniques.
In the latest one, Scott, a Svelte fanboy, sits down with Wes to disseminate the intricacies of SvelteKit’s latest (and sometimes confusing) features, namely remote functions and updates to form processing.
The Bad
We all know new technology and metaframeworks are cool and fun — until they’re not safe. As with any sophisticated piece of technology, one should be very cautious about this aspect of the tooling ecosystem.
The metaframeworks hacker, zhero, published some new in-depth research and a vulnerability disclosure — this time the victim was Astro, and the vector was middleware (again). I admire how he thoughtfully derives ideas from official standards, and I’m glad he’s doing that for good, because recent npm vulnerabilities (see the details on this Adspect Cloaking campaign, or the expr-eval package issue), for instance, weren’t that well-mannered. The official security advisory is available here, so don’t forget to update your Astro-based projects accordingly.
The much bigger noise was raised by the recent Cloudflare outage. You might ask, what does this mean for the metaframeworks industry? In my humble opinion, it’s another good lesson on avoiding vendor lock-in, both broadly and especially with tools that tie you tightly to a single provider — for instance, metaframeworks like RedwoodSDK, which are closely coupled to Cloudflare infrastructure. While the tools themselves are great, one should always weigh the risks of narrowing the escape routes.
The Noteworthy
Nevertheless, RedwoodSDK continues coming closer to declaring stability; the team announced a beta for v1, with lots of fixes and improvements if you feel adventurous enough to try and support the comparatively new project.
If, on the other hand, you want a bit more on Svelte and SvelteKit beyond what Wes and Scott discussed, check out the latest official November blog post, which, among other things, explains improvements to forms and how to use the new fork API in SvelteKit.
Fresh 2.2.0, in addition to new helpers and fixes, brings significant additions and examples to the docs, which is really cool — I think Fresh has long needed clearer, more attractive explanations of the mechanics and details.
As you can see, many — if not most — of the news items in this issue of Metaframeworks Records were dedicated to hype, FOMO, and everything around them. Almost everywhere, a counterpart appeared where some cautious person (or a boring outage) said, “We don’t do that here”. It still makes sense to build software with boring JS tech like Express.js and jQuery. Sometimes the better approach is to welcome innovation while calmly selecting technologies that make more — and safer — sense. That’s why we’re here; hopefully, see you next time on the train to a bright metaframeworks future.
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