Next.js is infuriating

Deno Fresh seems like it has the right approach. It’s not complicated, the docs are refreshingly simple, and it handles both server and client logic without getting confused.

It’s just a shame it’s Deno-only (although I completely understand why)

I had a project slated to use this framework. The pilot went fairly well. Fresh has the right ideas on static vs dynamic islands. In the end, we deployed with Astro - which also has similar ideas. In the end, I just wasn't able to get full buy-in on Deno.

I feel like Fresh being Deno only isn't the primary issue. It's based on Preact which is really just a non-starter for so many because it isolates away too much of the react ecosystem instantly.

I don’t disagree on that front, the React ecosystem is huge, and rebuilding a load of complex components is often beyond the budgets of many greenfield projects.

I also don’t believe a React monoculture is good, so a growing Preact or Solid ecosystem would be really positive, alongside growing web/DOM standards to ultimately make these frameworks more of a light wrapper around some trivial updates.

React and Next.js, to me, have done the typical architecture astronaut thing, and it feels like they’ve both increased the barrier to entry and just made everything a little more complicated than it really needs to be for much of the web.

That’s a shame, I’ve also been through much the same process.

Astro is pretty good too, though. I’m not 100% sure on some of the decisions it’s made, and personally don’t enjoy the need for new file formats and domain specific languages, but it does a half decent job of being framework-agnostic despite a few pain points.

I think HonoX is similar to Fresh, with the Interactive Islands

https://fresh.deno.dev/docs/concepts/islands

https://github.com/honojs/honox?tab=readme-ov-file#interacti...

Ooo nice, I didn’t know about this. Thanks for posting, looks interesting, and framework agnostic to boot :)

(Edit: well, potentially at least)

I did try to make something like this a couple years back to deal with multiple renderers and a choose-your own set of various SSR techniques [0], but didn’t get very far with it in the end. I should have based it on Hono really, to get web standard Request objects.

[0] https://github.com/coxmi/ssr-tools

Fresh looks promising but still has no support for any CSS solution that is not Tailwind.

Edit: I just saw an email from two hours ago that they added support for any CSS solution because they just migrated to Vite. This is promising!