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Comment by toastercat | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately, "easier" does not always equal "simpler". Next.js/CRA is "easier" because it hides a lot of the complexity away from you. In my opinion, ignoring how it all works under the hood and just blindly accepting tools/clis because "it works" sets you up for confusion down the road. I've met several JS developers who don't know that JSX gets transformed to JavaScript function calls after a build step -- they just assume it's part of how browsers work at this point. And that is mindblowing to me.

Most of what OP needs can probably be achieved with a few HTML files and <script> tags. It will probably be a few more keystrokes than `npx create-next-app`, but the disconnect between the code he/she is writing and the final running application will be much smaller, and I think he/she will have a better understanding of what the heck is going on.

Fair point on htmx and Alpine; I have not given Alpine a shot yet, but it looks nice from the docs.

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> I've met several JS developers who don't know that JSX gets transformed to JavaScript function calls after a build step -- they just assume it's part of how browsers work at this point. And that is mindblowing to me.

I believe you, and I've also met some like you described who came to our interviews indeed, but it's more like the failure of their mentors. I've also met back-end engineers, with a lot of experience, who couldn't write a simple HTTP service with C#, without using ASP.NET, nor open a simple DB connection without using EntityFramework APIs.

Understanding what's going on will be even harder if it's not your main field (back-end developer just trying to get front-end out of the way) and some magic there won't cause a lot of problems IMHO.

failure of their mentors? To an early point, but beyond that everyone who considers themselves a professional needs to sit down with a book or three and understand stuff. 'mentors' is a small excuse IMO.

I'm currently mentoring some junior devs and perhaps I was thinking about them when answering. You are absolutely correct on that.

Ha! I've met web developers that didn't know that you could do form posts without a JSON API

This is a valid criticism of SSR and the complex mental model it requires to implement effectively, even with Next.js. You need a firm understanding of the HTTP request lifecycle and the serialization boundary. For a novice programmer starting with frontend dev, I would not recommend starting with Next for this reason (create-react-app would be better).

But for an experienced backend developer, the mental model of Next is no problem, and the flexibility of SSR will feel liberating. After a few weeks you might even put down the Flask!

If you want to use SSR on your pages, I'd recommend sampling some Next projects (just pick one of the examples and get it running locally). You might like what you find. And for closer integration with Python, I'm sure there are options for server-side rendering of JSX that you could use, although they'll all ultimately need to either wrap a JS runtime or emulate JSX compilation in Python. So you may as well just skip the middleman and go to straight to react, whether via a framework or otherwise.

If you don't want a heavy framework, or you just want basic CSR for some richer pages, you can accomplish a lot with just `react` and `esbuild`. Even SSR is just a matter of calling `ReactDOMServer.renderToPipeableStream()` and doesn't need a framework like Next. They're just nice because they take care of all the problems you'd end up solving in a robust deployment anyway.

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