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Comment by popup21 | Hacker News Reader

Wouldn't do it any other way.

I dipped out of web dev in 2015 to run an ecommerce project. I stopped tracking all the latest js framework news. I settled on a barebones CSS rule set. I stopped choosing SPAs as the starting point for mvp ideas. I shelved Wordpress and moved some content sites over to Netlify and just recently started using a nifty desktop ssr cms instead of Hugo, Gatsby, etc.

I was regressing to the environment I understood in the early 2000s-2010s. I did all of this because I knew there would be a steep learning curve going into modern ecommerce and it seemed reasonable to put everything into hibernation while I attempted to go all-in.

I pretty much missed the entire React, Angular, Vue ramp up in the industry.

I've since shut down that ecommerce project and find myself peeking back to the js-verse every now and then.

I doubt I'll ever voluntarily use one of those frameworks for web dev.

I do, however, like this thing called, Svelte.

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> I doubt I'll ever voluntarily use one of those frameworks for web dev.

> I do, however, like this thing called, Svelte.

Svelte is just another one of “those frameworks”, except with a vastly smaller community: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US&q=svelte%20i...

And without a virtual dom and all of its overhead.

Virtual dom isn’t that expensive compared to modifying dom. Svelte isn’t magical, it’s still diffing objects to figure out whether to change some dom element’s attributes

With react memoization and pure components, you get very similar benefits.

Sure svelte goes the extra step and removes unnecessary diffing of constant attributes that will never change and other opts. However there are tradeoffs

Svelte components compile to vanilla javascript plus a small runtime (a dozen or so functions that track state for context and the developer tools). It's much lighter weight than React or Vue's runtime and a side effect is that integrating Svelte components into other frameworks is a breeze (especially if you compile to web components). The author refers to it more as a separate language.

I've had a great experience with it recently developing a smart tv app - which are dog slow even with a quad core ARM CPU due to the resolution so I decided to learn Svelte for the project. The big downside is another templating language to learn and as you said, the community is tiny, but the surface area is small enough that it hasn't been a problem regarding tooling or debugging. Pulling in other frameworks into a svelte app is also relatively easy so it can be part of a slow incremental rewrite, although as always it devolves into a webpack/rollup config mess.

> Svelte components compile to vanilla javascript plus a small runtime

Same could be said of React though. React components are literally just plain JavaScript functions which return VDOM nodes that get diffed and applied to the DOM by the runtime library.

The only objective advantage I see to Svelte is it's tiny footprint, which if you really need you can already get by using Preact (3kb vs Svelte's 3.5kb) without having to learn yet-another-completely-arbitrary-templating-language to no benefit.

Svelte is actually quite a bit different. Quoting a random section from their docs

"[Svelte is a] compiler that knows at build time how things could change in your app, rather than waiting to do the work at run time"

My point being there is a large amount of compile time code transformation at build time. The run time is not so much a framework as a library like libc. In Svelte when you update state there is no virtual dom, dom diffing, fibers, or anything. It would have been compiled into a direct dom update of anything depending on it. It's no longer a Svelte app just vanillajs. There are some details or course but it's a different paradigm than to react or other modern UI frameworks.

I made a web app framework [0] for people like you (and me). It lets you use static HTML to build a web app.

Data attributes store data in the page and add dynamic features (like CRUD functionality and drag and drop sorting) very easily.

Plus, the whole thing is server rendered with Handlebars, so the front-end JS part isn't even required for 95% of visitors (it's only necessary if you're an admin who can edit the current page).

I wrote it because I missed the simple days of jQuery and REST APIs.

[0] https://remaketheweb.com/

Interesting. How are you deploying the server side environment?

It's an open source Node.js app, so you can deploy yourself it to any host with a persistent file system. No 3rd party database required -- it uses a file-based architecture to make it easier to get started with and modify the data. Its goal is to be simpler and easier to work with than anything else out there.

There's also a built-in CLI that can deploy to our free hosting service, which is built on top of Digital Ocean.

> recently started using a nifty desktop ssr cms instead of Hugo, Gatsby, etc.

What are you using?

Publii. It's developed by a European (France, I think) team. It syncs to Netlify with a single mouse-click.

Thanks!

+1 for Publii. It feels like it's early days for them (i.e. they only have a few themes & haven't been picked up by the third-party theme developer crowd yet), but man, does Publii make it easy for any end-user to generate and publish a static website.

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