"What you're building is the holy grail for developers. No one has succeeded so far." 🏆 ☠️
This is the feedback from Y Combinator when...
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Dude this is the story of persistence and grind work! Matija 🔥
This inspires developers like me a lot!
Thanks Saurabh! Really appreciate your comment :)
From the post and the documentation I read I would not say the project is a Rails or a Laravel. I think the only thing it has in common with the frameworks is that it uses convention over configuration.
It looks more like an orchestration tool.
I wonder how far you can go with the abstraction of the dependencies.
Interesting to hear how you perceive it!
Why we compared Wasp to Rails/Laravel - because it's opinionated, great for rapid prototyping, and covers the full stack (client, server, database, deployment).
Abstraction of the dependencies - yeah, that's something that we're testing and discovering as we go. In theory we have a lot of flexibility because of the compiler/code generation, but there is definitely custom work to be done for each new stack/lang/architecture. We have already been internally playing with running Rust server code within Wasp, but Python is probably going to be a more immediate target with which we will go public.
It is mainly that abstraction of dependencies that makes me think it is in an other category than the frameworks. Because they are hard coupled to their language.
Also the frameworks are not responsible for the client and deployment. That is done by other tools.
I understand! This is actually how we initially thought about it, too, so we presented it as a DSL. But from building and talking to people, we figured out that calling it a framework makes it much more straightforward for developers since that is the role/function that Wasp essentially fulfills. It would also fall in a category of meta-frameworks, like e.g. Next/Astro, which are frameworks that make use of other libs/frameworks such as React.
For me Next is not a meta-framework because the hard coupling with React. If it was a meta-framework Nuxt (Vue) and Sapper (Svelte) wouldn't exist. It is more an isomorphic framework that allow you to run the same components on the server and in the browser. That is been done by meteor years before Next existed.
Astro is also not a meta-framework. Switching different UI libraries for me is like switching from Blade to Twig in Laravel. It is just another template engine.
Astro is different in a sense that it outputs html instead of pushing a shell of html and UI library code.
Which is how back-end frameworks always been working.
I understand creating a tool that does a bit of everything is hard to categorise.
that is true👍 next.js is not meta-framework
Meteor was also one of the frameworks that served as an inspiration for what we are building at Wasp! Thanks for sharing your knowledge - I'll definitely look a bit more in how people perceive what a meta framework actually is.
😁🐝
I remember starring the repo a few years ago. Congrats on 15k!
Thank you for your support, Ansell! :)
Wow! I didn't know Wasp was a YC startup. Doing it long enough really works :)
As YC says, there are only two rules in startups:
Nice. I have wondered why the academic computer languages community has ignored the big problems of web development for decades. Very long ago there was a project called Bigwig at a Canadian university. Can't remember which. That was on the right track. But no one else picked up the ball. The CLists are focused on small and theoretical stuff. Huge missed opportunity in my book. And I did my PhD in language stuff.
I completely understand where you're coming from - we did a lot of research on other attempts at this and concluded the same. There were academic attempts (e.g., WebDSL being one of the more recent ones), but it never really left the academic circles, and they never got that community adoption push. But the idea itself has definitely been floating around for the last few decades.
Good on 'ya for having studied the literature. Yeah I think it's all about incentives. The academics are in the business of cranking out papers, which boils out to justifying their next round of funding. The frameworks they do develop are just means to that end. The shear effort it takes to gain broad acceptance - which you've explained well - has no payoff for them. The clinker is that many (most?) academic grants are focused on sustaining research efforts for their own sake, without paying enough attention to practical impact. They throw the community development task over the wall and hope someone else picks it up, which seldom happens. The main mechanism I see is "doing a startup" to hawk an academic idea as a product. But that is way too big a leap for diffuse concepts like languages that solve problems of distributed applications.
Well put!
That topology visualization is cool! What is the name for that kind of diagram when designing or just diagrammatic your current apps design to team members? I've been trying to find an effective way to explain the design at this level, routes, use cases, services, domain entities, commands/queries via diagram but couldn't find any tips or the name of this type of diagram.
Glad you like it! Hmm not sure what would be the "official" name of this kind of diagram, or if there is one. We typically call it "high-level overview" or "topology" as mentioned here. It directly derives from what Wasp as a framework "understands" about your app, so that's why we can show it in this form.
Thanks for this! I learned a lot! 📚
Let’s go!
what a boomer response from a tik toker
Kids don't say that anymore?
I'm really glad I found WASP, I've been exploring it for the past 2 months and what you guys are doing is simply amazing. I don't have much background in full stack web dev, and this framework allowed me to build things much much faster.
I'm especially grateful to you for making OpenSaaS open source 🫶
Thank you Gustavo! Really glad you're finding Wasp useful, and thanks for your support :) Definitely join our Discord (discord.gg/rzdnErX) and show us what you built.
Congrats on hitting 15,000 stars—what a milestone! Your persistence through the “drought” phase to this point is genuinely motivating for developers like me. I appreciate how Wasp simplifies full-stack development, especially with tools like OpenSaaS cutting down setup time. The topology visualization is a standout feature—any plans to name or standardize that kind of diagram? It’d be a game-changer for explaining app architecture to teams.
Thank you!
🔥🔥
I am curious about the python plans. I don't know if I would adopt this, but I might start experimenting with it if there is a flask + react option later
got it! The initial idea with python is not replace node/express for biz logic on the server, but rather to make it possible for a dev to easily run python scripts/jobs next to it. E.g. if you have an ML pipeline written in python, you could run it and get the results back in Node.
Congrats @matijasos
Thanks, Nikola!
Sweet, looking forward to building the 1.0!
Many more to come! 🐝🌟
Absolutely incredible to see the growth—huge kudos to the entire team!
Beyond the technical achievement, this reads as a story of resilience and an unwavering belief in personal abilities. Bravo, again.
This inspires developers like me a lot!
This is so inspiring. More wins and stars to you guyss!
Thank you! :)
A truly inspiring journey. Thanks for posting this..
Cong on 15k
👏👏👏
Damn they beat me to it
AdonisJs is the Laravel of JS. Clickbait.
Why do you think that?