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Comment by chrisldgk | Hacker News Reader

I agree with that it’s not a new concept by itself, but the way it’s being done is much more elegant in my opinion.

I originally started as a web developer during the time where PHP+jQuery was the state of the art for interactive webpages, shortly before React with SPAs became a thing.

Looking back at it now, architecturally, the original approach was nicer, however DX used to be horrible at the time. Remember trying to debug with PHP on the frontend? I wouldn’t want to go back to that. SPAs have their place, most so in customer dashboards or heavily interactive applications, but Astro find a very nice balance of having your server and client code in one codebase, being able to define which is which and not having to parse your data from whatever PHP is doing into your JavaScript code is a huge DX improvement.

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> Remember trying to debug with PHP on the frontend? I wouldn’t want to go back to that.

I do remember that, all too well. Countless hours spent with templates in Symfony, or dealing with Zend Framework and all that jazz...

But as far as I remember, the issue was debuggability and testing of the templates themselves, which was easily managed by moving functionality out of the templates (lots of people put lots of logic into templates...) and then putting that behavior under unit tests. Basically being better at enforcing proper MVC split was the way to solve that.

The DX wasn't horrible outside of that, even early 2010s which was when I was dealing with that for the first time.

Bingo.

Modern PHP development with Laravel is wildly effective and efficient.

Facebook brought React forth with influences from PHPs immediate context switching and Laravel’s Blade templates have brought a lot of React and Vue influences back to templating in a very useful way.

Well, that's a way to manage server-side logic, but your progressively-enhanced client-side logic (i.e. JS) still wasn't necessarily easy to debug, let alone being able to write unit tests for them.

> but your progressively-enhanced client-side logic (i.e. JS) still wasn't necessarily easy to debug, let alone being able to write unit tests for them

True, don't remember doing much unit testing of JavaScript at that point. Even with BackboneJS and RequireJS, manual testing was pretty much the approach, trying to make it easy to repeat things with temporary dev UIs and such, that were commented out before deploying (FTPing). Probably not until AngularJS v1 came around, with Miško spreading the gospel of testing for frontend applications, together with Karma and PhantomJS, did it feel like the ecosystem started to pick up on testing.

There wasn't as much JS to test. I built a progressively-enhanced SQLite GUI not too long ago to refresh my memory on the methodology, and I wound up with 50-ish lines of JS not counting Turbo. Fifty. It was a simple app, but it had the same style of partial DOM updates and feel that you would see from a SPA when doing form submissions and navigation.

Not usually, but in the context of

> Astro find a very nice balance of having your server and client code in one codebase, being able to define which is which and not having to parse your data from whatever PHP is doing into your JavaScript code is a huge DX improvement.

the point is pretty much that you can do more JS for rich client-side interactions in a much more elegant way without throwing away the benefits of "back in the days" where that's not needed.

The main difference is as simple as modern web pages having on average far more interactivity.

More and more logic moved to the client (and JS) to handle the additional interactivity, creating new frameworks to solve the increasing problems.

At some point, the bottleneck became the context switching and data passing between the server and the client.

SPAs and tools like Astro propose themselves as a way to improve DX in this context, either by creating complete separation between the two words (SPAs) or by making it transparent (Astro)

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