I think the same. To me it looks like a Vercel marketing employee wrote that.
959 karma · joined September 19, 2022
I can't recommend it enough. If you never tried/learnt about it, check it out. Unless you're building an offline first app, it's 100% the safest way to go in my opinion for 99.9% of projects.
But what you say is true. Blade is amazing.
And I’m not going to get into the details of whether that stack would work for non backend developers, developers working on medium/large projects and/or medium/large teams. That’s a separate and unrelated discussion.
But compare what Django brings you (Stone Age templating system and that’s it) to what Laravel provides out of the box (or via official packages) like assets bundling, live reloading, an amazing and modern template system with proper “component like” partials or even if you need them, the “big guns” such as Inertia or Livewire. More or less the same is true for Rails with the Hotwire stuff.
There’s absolutely no point of comparison here. Even if that works for you, Django is not even in the same league.
It is still a great backend framework though, which was my point.
Frontend wise, Django is in the Stone Age.
Look at Laravel or rails if you want a really complete full stack solution.
That is… I wouldn’t even think about using it because it’s very likely they will change their mind next year and come up with something totally different. Again.
These guys are really, really obsessed with download counts. They brag a lot about that in twitter every time they have a chance.
What they want to reuse is the package name.
So now they launch whatever bullshit they are playing with now under the “remix” package and the next day they’ll say “look… we have N thousands downloads per second!!! We are so successful”
They did this multiple times. And will keep doing it because they are obsessed with this.
No thanks...
I usually make the analogy of a video game, where you can pick the difficulty. Svelte/SvelteKit is working in the "easy" difficulty level. You can achieve the same end result and keep your sanity (and your hair).
I don’t even want to talk to somebody that defines themselves as a “React” developer. Let alone work with them.
If you know any of these frameworks, and the basics of web development you can work in any of them.
So the hiring part is not an excuse for this.
If your app is that simple you don't even need Rails.
In my experience, everything starts that simple. But then time passes, team members rotate, and... your PM keeps asking to add more and more features... And that's when the "simplicity of hotwire" becomes a nightmare to maintain. And guess what, the next dev that comes to the project will hate all the hotwire crap, and whoever built it.
It's easier to make a simple list and a form with React/vue/svelte even if it seems overkill at first, because when things get more difficult you already have the big guns. If you start with the tools to build simple, well.... wish your project stays that simple forever, or that you're given enough time to rewrite everything.
> 37signals is afterall running multiple successful products with Rails, and one of them is an email client.
These applications may be a successful product, despite of hotwire, but they're not a good example of anything. They feel like shit to me (using them from Europe). And again, the main problem is not the end result but the maintenance. If there's anything we've got from all of this mess, is that implementing UIs as "components" are the best idea in the last 10 years.
Stop beating the dead horse of variables interpolated in templates. It just doesn't work (unless you work alone).
The fact people can't escape JavaScript doesn't stop people from being JS haters.
Unless you work 100% alone (and for a smallish project) hotwire leads to a real mess nobody can work on way before anything else I've ever seen in my life.
Don't waste your time.
They're all almost the same (crap), but the real issue is the instability of all of them. They change every week, they're constantly pushed sideways by the VCs or other interests behind them (or the constant mind change of their devs, i.e. React Router.. I mean Remix... I mean framework mode... I mean now we nap and then invent our own frontend framework but keep the old name, just to add a bit more to the confusion and keep everyone entertained).
They're overengineered, complex, and promote the little shiny "look how fast this counter updates in a type safe way" while they totally break down when you have to do real world serious stuff like authentication (ehh...go and use this SaaS..), authorization (ehh..what's that? just put an "if"), translations (who speaks other than english?..no need for that), background jobs or anything else a real world application needs. They're focused on the shiny "typesafe call server function" and everything else is just let on you to figure out, and good luck with the library you pick, because next week it's going to be a different one and you'll be out of fashion!
Many years ago I started using Inertia [1]. I'm confident to say it's the right, simple, most effective way to use React/Vue/Svelte. It's a super simple "protocol" with very thin adapters implementations that glue together your favorite frontend lib (react, vue, etc) with your favorite full stack backend framework (laravel, rails, django, adonis).
I've used it for client projects with both, Rails, Laravel and Adonis. I have no complaints about it. It works super well, follows a simple to understand model and you literally get the best of both worlds: a powerful frontend, and a powerful backend. It keeps things simple and stable using rock solid battle proven production ready building blocks with great documentation and community support.
I'm just done with all these other "meta frameworks". They're all marketing and hype and everyone is swallowing it and then ending up cornered with a terrible solution and a lots of problems they didn't account for and have no official or recommended solution to get out of it.
That won't happen if you use plain React/Vue. That won't happen if you use plain Laravel/Rails/Django/Adonis. Inertia just glues plain X + plain Y. No lock in. No possibility of being "stuck" in a situation where "I can't do X because...."... you can.. and you can in a very nice and clean framework-supported way.
It's a fantastic undervalued idea, and we're not paying enough attention to it (yet).
Don't fall for the marketing and the hype. Look for the simple and pragmatic solutions, they're there. They work. They're just not as hyped, so I'm hyping it up a bit for you in this post. Apparently that's what everything needs: Marketing.
Adonis + Inertia works wonderfully well. It's the best of both worlds. And the simplicity of this architecture is something to admire. It's very easy to know what's going on at every point: It's just requests, responses, middlewares and routes/views. Simple and easy, while still super powerful.
Thanks God most of us didn’t have to deal with that enterprise crap for long, and in my case it was thanks to PHP too.