[bpicolo]

Laravel Mix[0], Rails Webpacker[1], and Dotnet's Spa Services[2] (among others) all do fantastic jobs getting you going with new frontend tech alongside backend apps. It's kind of amazing that the JS world does a bit of a worse job here. Too much focus on the hip new way vs getting things done? Seems boilerplate exists mostly to make "Universal" apps now, but I've yet to see a straightforward attempt at that (not to mention, the distinction for things that work in-browser vs not is going to be confusing for beginners in the single-language-JS approach). create-react-app is fine but it only does half the job.

[0] https://laravel.com/docs/5.5/mix

[1] https://github.com/rails/webpacker

[2] https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/webdev/2017/02/14/building-...

[sampl]

What would you add to create-react-app?

[bpicolo]

My typical case is needing a backend for an API layer (and also pages I just don't want to fuss with SPAs for - data-heavy admin pages and such where it's a bunch of wasted effort and boilerplate to do in SPA form). With the alternatives above you get that integrated in dev environments all the way through minified in production.

[sampl]

Totally makes sense, thanks

[GFischer]

Thanks for the links, I wasn't aware of SpaServices :)

[bpicolo]

SpaServices is especially fun as it runs a nodejs sidecar and does server-side rendering pretty much seamlessly (if you use the yo generator to bootstrap an app). No idea how well it adapts/scales in production, but it does work well from the getgo. I prefer the sidecar model to running nodejs on the backend in general, though, so I'm biased in that regard.