There has been a raging debate in some corners of the front-end development community about the continuing impact of React. It has gotten heated, especially since Alex Russell posted his 'The Market for Lemons' post. In it, he calls out not just the React team but also other vendors who are deeply invested in React. There were also posts from Andy Bell, Zach Leatherman and Laurie Voss, among others.
React has been a core component of many Jamstack sites since Gatsby popularized it in an SSG, with Next.js being the dominant framework for Jamstack development. Nonetheless, whatever side you take in this debate and as this newsletter makes clear, you have a lot of options for building in the Jamstack, both with and without React.
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The Future (and the Past) of the Web is Server Side Rendering
It feels like we’re seeing a slow and steady shift away from client-side rendering and large JavaScript bundles. This post goes into the back and forth history of rendering and then walks through how to do a fully server-rendered interactive app using Deno’s Fresh framework.
Andy Jiang
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Intro to HTML-First Frontend Frameworks
The post defines HTML-first front-end frameworks as ones that prioritize sending complete functional HTML versus a JavaScript bundle and looks at some of the different approaches taken by different frameworks/tools like Qwik, Marko, Astro, Eleventy, Fresh and Enhance.
SitePen Engineering
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Gatsby, Netlify, and the Pull of General‑Purpose Platforms
This post argues that the Gatsby acquisition is the beginning of a trend to rein in the chaos of frontend development — it discusses how Gatsby’s Valhalla product fits into this vision of Netlify's to target larger enterprises.
Matt Asay
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✂︎ Tools, Resources & More...
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Humanizer: A Minimal Static Site Generator – An intentionally simple static site generator built in PHP that includes an admin for managing pages and content.
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Mockend – A service that provides customized API mocking that you can develop your UI against. Free for open source or non-commercial sites.
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Databar – A new service that lets you explore 120+ datasets across 20+ categories and import them into GSheets, Airtable, and more. It also claims to have a Python and JavaScript SDK, though I couldn't find links.
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Using JavaScript in a WebC Component
By default, Eleventy bundles up any JavaScript in a WebC component. Ray shows how to use that bundled JavaScript. Also catch his other post on getting the most recent Mastodon post of an account and embedding it.
Raymond Camden
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Thanks for reading. — Brian
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