[blue_waters]

We've built applications in nearly every major framework there is - from plain old PHP, to Rails, to Laravel, to Vue.js, to React SPAs, and now SSR/RPC-style frameworks like Next.js and React Server Components.

The one thing that has really caught our eye - and I feel is the real breakthrough these days - is the new generation of SSR/RPC-style frameworks like Solid Start, SvelteKit (I'm assuming?), TanStack Start, and of course Next.js and React Server Components (oh and React Router 7 née Remmix ¯\_(ツ)_/¯). Being able to code in 'server module space' and have data available in advance of the render cycle, without having to write a separate API layer - is great. For example, we can - if we chose to, write a Next.js application as an all dynamic app (no statically generated or cached pages) and treat it pretty much as we would a PHP application that renders a template on initial renders. The only remaining hill to climb is the performance of the initial render in SSR as this is catastrophically slow in React (we implement short TTL Level 1 caches in Nginx so that we can survive scaling a response to any 'popular' dynamic pages in our applications). I've heard (but not tested) that Solid's SSR life cycle is better in this respect. We can do the same in Astro 'server' mode. We've not yet looked at SvelteKit.

As for the rest, I agree that this quote nails it: "Don't choose tools that alienate you from your work. Choose tools that leverage the wisdom you've already accumulated and help you to cultivate a deeper understanding of the discipline.". For us this translates into CSS and CSS Modules as our style system, as we watched - mortified, as an entire CSS-in-JS ecosystem (ala Styled components, Motion.js) was basically told to get stuffed when the shift to SSR/RPC and streamed responses occurred. We narrowly dodged that bullet. It also means casting a very cautious eye over Tailwind CSS (ignoring how it can be abused, and arguably encourages duplication and bad practices in component reuse), as the recent Tailwind 4 release demonstrated by the manner in which guidance on migration was published for first-party plugins like Typography.

I love the web - despite the complexity. And I agreed whole hardheartedly with statements from people like Rich Harris when he says the web is ours to nurture and protect [paraphrased].