Rich Harris: Futuristic Web Development

I don't feel like this page really does SvelteKit justice. SvelteKit is kind of like Next.js but taken to the next level. I know people using less mainstream frameworks tend to be a bit overzealous in their advocacy, but I've been using SvelteKit a bunch and I love it more than any framework I've ever used: - All the component/JS/CSS/HTML/endpoint plumbing is taken care of and optimized for you with no configuration. Including code-splitting per route! You can get up and running in seconds. - Can use the same JS/TS on the front and backends. This was always my issue with Django and Rails. - Server-rendered for performance and SEO with client-side hydration of components. - Optional client-side routing for performance. - Filesystem-based routes are so easy to use and maintain. Want to make a new route? Just make a new file in the /routes folder! Want to modify an existing route but don't know where to look? Just look at the url and it's the same as the folder structure! It's always annoying to have to hunt around to find code. - Pre-rendering aka static page generation per route! This means you can run a static marketing site and the dynamic app off the same stack. This is something I've always run into and never felt like I had a good experience with. - I don't know how they did it but the dev experience is blazing fast with instant hot module reloading. - Deploy to any static, serverless, or server host. You can make your own "adapter" for any platforms that aren't already s

I think many people adopted React because Facebook was behind it, and using it in production, the ecosystem is huge, there is a react- package for everything you can image, there is also react-native, I don't like it, but there it is, you can reuse the knowledge to build native mobile apps. Now Svelte, I haven't been following, but I think the creators are working in what's going to be next and even better framework[1], to your point of things in Svelte not changing as much as in React, maybe it just a matter of time. Here is the video I had in my bookmarks for a while, I still couldn't make the time to watch, so I hope my comment is not too far from reality. [1] ▶ this video

Rich Harris did a great talk[0] at an early stage of SvelteKit's development called "Futuristic Web Development". I really do believe this is the next phase of how JS web frameworks will work in the future. [0] ▶ this video

Check out the creator's first posts and videos of sveltekit when he introduced the alpha version: ▶ this video The way I understand it is it's an evolution of sapper to be more versatile, especially with respect to the backend. Out of the box it can work more easily with serverless providers that give you static file hosting + some kind of basic API gateway and serverless function platform. So you can write full stack client and server-side code all using the same framework (like you can with sapper). But the key difference from sapper is that you're not stuck using a node.js backend, with sveltekit you can swap in different backend implementations, like one targeting a serverless/lambda system.

In addition to links in sibling comments, there's the official Svelte blog with regular updates: link and this video from recent conference on the future of Svelte: ▶ this video

Relatively recent news, Sapper is not getting a 1.0.0. Svelte is going in a different direction in the future. ▶ this video

And... Sapper is dead btw. Rich said it recently in a video. The Svelte team is working on the next big thing combining Svelte with Snowpack. The project is called SvelteKit. ▶ this video

As an aside, Sapper in particular is probably not the future, as there’s been an unofficial announcement[1] that it will be replaced with file-based routing built in to the Svelte app template. 1: ▶ this video