At the point of server components I sort of giggle to myself that we've come full circle and maybe I can come out of my SSR bomb shelter and enjoy life again
I’m sure they’ll claim it’s different now because… hydration or something or another.
As a former PHP developer who spent a lot of time both working on server rendered pages and converting server rendered pages to be API/JS (render the core in HTML+JS and use APIs with two way data binding to update the UI), I can’t believe we’re going back that way, but with wildly more complicated patterns than we had before.
I just wish we had skipped all the in-between stuff and just arrived at htmx back in 2011 instead of now. Maybe I'd still be doing frontend stuff and not burying my head as far into backend as humanly possible while I wait for a workflow that doesn't require a package.json and a 3 GB node_modules folder so I can make the same frontend widget I could make with 50 lines of js in 2007.
We kind of did (well, 2013), but it just wasn't backed by a massive developer marketing effort.
It feels like the end state here is going to be HTML+CSS with JS for interactivity using APIs, which is exactly what I was doing in 2006.
It’s all JS, which we know from the frontend, all that "magic" is done by the framework in the background. You write it once, it works both ways automatically.
We already build 3 webapps using SvelteKit, still happy for the ease of use, or great "DX" as some call it.
I remember writing PHP and JSF back in the 90s and 00s, and the experience of both writing RSC and Next.js as well as using websites built with these technologies is simply not comparable.
Also, I recall heavily using jQuery and Ajax to update parts of the page before Spa’s came along.
People want that back, but they also like React, and their existing component libraries, and they want to generate the backend pages with React. It's not that strange.
And you can (I think) pretty seamlessly have part of the page rendered on the server, and parts still function on the client.
Is it because these devs can only do React and nothing else, so we will shoehorn everything into it?
I mean, more power to them, if they want to do it and have 10x the complexity and take 10x longer than learning and using normal, already available tools.
The server side components didn't seem to me at a glance significantly less convenient then say a normal PHP server stack.
Modern SSR implies just do simple rendering on the server and hook it up with simple tools like Htmx, Turbolinks, etc.
Keep the complexity accessible on the outside, like the Pompidou Centre.