Issue #44: Uprising

🎵 Paranoia is in bloom, the PR transmissions will resume… 🎵

May the force be with you! This issue of Metaframeworks Records is dedicated to rebellions of all sorts in the full-stack web application development industry and the laser-sharpest spear of it — the metaframeworks. From new tools challenging the status quo through imperial strikes to last hopes of the ecosystem and community — let’s see what the last fortnight has brought to us.

The Good

Jovi De Croock (of Preact) has risen up with a new (unsurprisingly) Preact-based metaframework called Pracht. Multiple flexible rendering modes, pragmatic no-bullshit architecture, a lot of DX goodness out of the box, and (unavoidable these days) thoughtful and bittersweet assistance of Claude Code as a second-best contributor. While being a personal project more than an ambitious enterprise undertaking, the tool is quite enticing for me personally as I truly believe Preact is the nicest thing in UI development in the XXI century.

At the same time, Dominic Gannaway (of Ripple) decided to revolt against JSX and TSX reign in the webdev industry and came up with their own “language for the agentic era” creatively called TSRX. It got a lot of support from the community as a possible answer to a bunch of DX problems in JSX-based templating.

On this background of loud announcements of the industry-breaking innovations, Brisa creator Aral Roca wrote an interesting (even though slightly niche, but I’m a big AST exploration fan personally) piece on his experience with enhancing prerendering performance in Brisa through a nifty system-level workaround discovered during his side open-source activities.

Similar to that, Daishi Kato (of Waku) shared some insights on his work with React Server Components (RSCs) in Waku and RSCs overthrowing their miniscule “feature” status to become a whole “architecture” story. Interestingly, it reminded me good old research on RSCs from Tiger Abrodi I can’t help sharing in this context.

The Bad

Dark side of the web development force never lets us chill out easily after (or during) working with our tools. Even something sacred is not a show stopper for them, like for instance, the clean reputation of the TanStack ecosystem which the shameless Sith decided to attack with their brandsquatting sabres. Npm is truly dark these days with even the security companies themselves falling victims of the supply chain attacks and compromises. It’s hard to advise anything more than the usual sane measures for protecting yourselves and your metaphorical children (the apps, of course) but maybe I’d recommend checking out the famous resistance organisation called OWASP and their projects, especially their evergreen incubator list (scroll the page down!) which is quite cool. For instance, this light and promising utility for fixing CVEs in your npm dependencies tree in a thoughtful and precise way without breaking the whole battleship.

Otherwise, without proper attention to the security, even the huge triangle empires may fall victims of major disruptions and no Jedi will help to prevent the disaster.

The Noteworthy

On a positive note, Remix team announced the long-anticipated version 3 beta preview of their renowned metaframework. Fewer dependencies and magic abstractions, more “unbundling” and “nativeness”, and more freedom overall.

In the same vein, Fresh gang published version 2.3 of their tool.

This release makes the “zero JavaScript by default” promise actually hold.

Interestingly, this release caused a pile of bugs and regressions requiring a couple of quick patches, and that probably can be attributed to the recent changes in the Deno org chart, but the guys do good, and there’s nothing in the JS world that cannot be fixed with a couple of more “if” statements.

Fortunately, TypeScript is here to save us even more, and the corresponding Microsoft team has declared availability of the glorious version 7 beta (the very Go rewrite with 10x performance — even if not for everyone). And even though you can summon a Cthulhu while thoroughly following the usage guidance, that’s a big thing already that you can test that, and I’m impatiently waiting for version 7.1 which will unlock the access to the new Go-powered TypeScript Compiler API.

And if you’re also into fancy compilers, you’ll be glad to check out new Analog version 2.5 with fast compilation option support (and other cool features and improvements of course).

Consistently bringing awesome innovation vibes to the metaframeworks space, Astro team has published a new version 6.2 with a bunch of experiments — do not try them, just do them, as usual.

All in all, the dark and light sides of the force are in constant confrontation and who am I to talk you over to one side or another but hear that: rebellions are built on hope and who knows — maybe they’re built with metaframeworks? Worth trying doing!

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