I'm never sure when to preface it but I'm the author of SolidJS. I've been working on it for almost 6 years now and spent the first few creating it on my own. So I think I can relate with some of the sentiment here:
Has anyone stopped to ask. "How do you build a SPA from the ground up?"
That's basically what I've been chronicling for the last few years across dozens of articles on medium and now on dev.to. The thing is when I built Solid it was for myself (and maybe the startup I worked at). I reveled at the small size (Solid has grown in features but the treeshakeable core for most apps is around 3.9kb compressed) and the performance topping almost any benchmark I could find. I even made claims that my client side framework could outperform their server side frameworks at even the metrics they claimed SSR benefitted.
I wasn't wrong.
I wasn't right either.
In fact this sentiment was all too popular about 5 years ago and I feel that was our real failing. We let things progress beyond their original design before they were ready for that use case. I'm not going to say there isn't a bit of a misalignment here. The more popular these solutions get the more likely people are trying to apply them to places they were not designed for. Often simpler solutions fit better.
During the process I was hired by eBay to work on their framework, Marko. And one thing you realize there is not everyone has the same device or network, and that not every organization can deliver products in a way that doesn't require technology infrastructure to manage people as the product.
The one common thing I found suddenly being thrust into that world, and interacting with the maintainers of these libraries is they all care. In some cases the needs of an eCommerce giant or a Meta or Google are going to be different and the work caters to that, but I've never seen any indicator this is a product of that environment in terms of a pattern for excess.
In fact most core teams of frameworks or popular libraries are much smaller than you'd think. The Marko team at eBay was 2 people for 4 years. React core team I believe is around 8. These teams work like small cell in the midst of those 1000s of engineers. Honestly coming from a startup it felt familiar. And they are the ones trying to encourage best practices, trying to design things in a way that cause the least harm.
And like it or not, people like using these solutions so much they continue to want to use them anywhere they can. It might not be correct but there is huge interest and the tools are shifting to address that reality. Take it or leave it as just one guy to another, but having played on both teams this is bigger than you or me.
I'm glad you gained the experience of creating that framework. I've felt more fulfillment doing that than I have experienced during work over the years. If it is what you believe in share what you've built, get people excited about it. Show people a better way to do things, that's why we are all here. Speaking from experience you never know where that can take you.
Matthew effect. . . To be honest, the hooks mechanism of solidjs combined with tsx has greatly improved the pain of manual dependency management of react hooks, but its ecology is too small. IDE (webstorm/vscode), ui library, routing, state management, testing, graphql integration, there are too many things to deal with, the ecological isolation between front-end frameworks is already so high that it is almost impossible for the production environment to convince others Use an unknown framework
Definitely. This field also benefitted from the fact that constant newcomers were entering it at an incredible rate, and the range of projects and platforms it can apply to was increasing. Maybe we are passed that point now. But technology tends to go in phases. I've been in no particular rush. But yeah I doubt there will ever be another React without something colossal changing.
Web Dev full-stack [LAMP] since 2005, but much heavier on the JS stuff these days.
Jack of all Stacks, Master of some.
Always looking to learn new things. Always glad to help out, just ask.
Location
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Education
B.S. in Biochemistry 2004, M.S. in Computer Information Systems 2007
I fully agree with all the above. I've been in the industry for some 16 years and i've seen large corporations fail to implement proper practices, and large dev teams that can't product what a 2-man team could. I still deal with a lot of that day to day.
I understand the communities support the frameworks we have, and frankly, they're a better solution than the old stacks, then again the old stacks work too and like you said it depends on the size and needs of each company.
I've planned/designed various tools, applications, websites for different sized companies and know how that goes all too well, to the point where personally I feel everything should be custom and catered to what the business needs are, but that's a discussion for another time.
As for my Taino JS, it was a proof of concept. I don't expect people to pick it up and use it, but i hope those who check it out learn a bit from it, so they're not so reliant on the larger frameworks without understanding what's happening at the language level itself, or at the browser level. Frameworks are great, until there's a bug and none of the devs can solve it because they don't really understand how the framework works. And this is more common than not, otherwise we wouldn't have thousands of issues on github repos regarding these things.
I also don't understand where people find the time to write such beautiful documentation and community sites for their projects, haha.
I'll have to check out SolidJS and see what it's like. Kudos on that, it looks "solid" :)
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I'm never sure when to preface it but I'm the author of SolidJS. I've been working on it for almost 6 years now and spent the first few creating it on my own. So I think I can relate with some of the sentiment here:
That's basically what I've been chronicling for the last few years across dozens of articles on medium and now on dev.to. The thing is when I built Solid it was for myself (and maybe the startup I worked at). I reveled at the small size (Solid has grown in features but the treeshakeable core for most apps is around 3.9kb compressed) and the performance topping almost any benchmark I could find. I even made claims that my client side framework could outperform their server side frameworks at even the metrics they claimed SSR benefitted.
I wasn't wrong.
I wasn't right either.
In fact this sentiment was all too popular about 5 years ago and I feel that was our real failing. We let things progress beyond their original design before they were ready for that use case. I'm not going to say there isn't a bit of a misalignment here. The more popular these solutions get the more likely people are trying to apply them to places they were not designed for. Often simpler solutions fit better.
During the process I was hired by eBay to work on their framework, Marko. And one thing you realize there is not everyone has the same device or network, and that not every organization can deliver products in a way that doesn't require technology infrastructure to manage people as the product.
The one common thing I found suddenly being thrust into that world, and interacting with the maintainers of these libraries is they all care. In some cases the needs of an eCommerce giant or a Meta or Google are going to be different and the work caters to that, but I've never seen any indicator this is a product of that environment in terms of a pattern for excess.
In fact most core teams of frameworks or popular libraries are much smaller than you'd think. The Marko team at eBay was 2 people for 4 years. React core team I believe is around 8. These teams work like small cell in the midst of those 1000s of engineers. Honestly coming from a startup it felt familiar. And they are the ones trying to encourage best practices, trying to design things in a way that cause the least harm.
And like it or not, people like using these solutions so much they continue to want to use them anywhere they can. It might not be correct but there is huge interest and the tools are shifting to address that reality. Take it or leave it as just one guy to another, but having played on both teams this is bigger than you or me.
I'm glad you gained the experience of creating that framework. I've felt more fulfillment doing that than I have experienced during work over the years. If it is what you believe in share what you've built, get people excited about it. Show people a better way to do things, that's why we are all here. Speaking from experience you never know where that can take you.
Matthew effect. . . To be honest, the hooks mechanism of solidjs combined with tsx has greatly improved the pain of manual dependency management of react hooks, but its ecology is too small. IDE (webstorm/vscode), ui library, routing, state management, testing, graphql integration, there are too many things to deal with, the ecological isolation between front-end frameworks is already so high that it is almost impossible for the production environment to convince others Use an unknown framework
Definitely. This field also benefitted from the fact that constant newcomers were entering it at an incredible rate, and the range of projects and platforms it can apply to was increasing. Maybe we are passed that point now. But technology tends to go in phases. I've been in no particular rush. But yeah I doubt there will ever be another React without something colossal changing.
I fully agree with all the above. I've been in the industry for some 16 years and i've seen large corporations fail to implement proper practices, and large dev teams that can't product what a 2-man team could. I still deal with a lot of that day to day.
I understand the communities support the frameworks we have, and frankly, they're a better solution than the old stacks, then again the old stacks work too and like you said it depends on the size and needs of each company.
I've planned/designed various tools, applications, websites for different sized companies and know how that goes all too well, to the point where personally I feel everything should be custom and catered to what the business needs are, but that's a discussion for another time.
As for my Taino JS, it was a proof of concept. I don't expect people to pick it up and use it, but i hope those who check it out learn a bit from it, so they're not so reliant on the larger frameworks without understanding what's happening at the language level itself, or at the browser level. Frameworks are great, until there's a bug and none of the devs can solve it because they don't really understand how the framework works. And this is more common than not, otherwise we wouldn't have thousands of issues on github repos regarding these things.
I also don't understand where people find the time to write such beautiful documentation and community sites for their projects, haha.
I'll have to check out SolidJS and see what it's like. Kudos on that, it looks "solid" :)