Meta Framework
The day when reactjs was the new cool kid on the block (hey, you even can write mobile apps with react-native), there were a lot of new paradigms that really excite me like JSX, components and props, redux as state manager, etc, etc.
People still trying to figure out how these new shiny things are. For me, I spent my whole weekend only creating a very basic web app, where I need to figure out how to integrate redux, navigation, session, and a lot of tedious stuff usually daunting to many people.
Before react famous, there was angular and with its MEAN stack, a full stack javascript developer can ship web apps all by himself. With react storm the show, angular feels like an ancient, that’s why there is one called MERN for react.
However, it still did not solve the hard part which set up a lot of boilerplate code like navigation or state management problem. And nextjs is released, which blew me away since it’s a complete react framework, think of it like laravel, django, but for react apps. This is game-changing since I don’t really need to set up the hard part by myself, there is a framework for that.
nextjs along with other js frameworks rage (that always coming every week) helps push javascript popularity further because of the ease of development and deployment.
zeit, then now, until become vercel is the company behind nextjs really knows well our pain point, developers.
We really like building stuff, but dislike figuring out boilerplate stuff. Then many terms like SSG, ISG, SSR, and CSR come and go, and promise better changes but in the end try to achieve the same thing, pleasant to develop with and faster web app performance.
I know, even as an enthusiast myself, I am sometimes tired of following the trends, but for curious people, it is like a fresh new perspective.
Now I am trying remixjs, and I personally really like it. Like nextjs early day, but now it tries to simplify the API call from frontend to the backend. Also nested routes which usually hard to implement.
Since most UI libraries are called “frameworks”, these more full-featured libraries push it forward, to calling themselves “meta-frameworks”.
Again it feels like the old day, circling back to the old paradigm but with a newer perspective. But I don’t mind it, actually, it benefits us, developers. To make our job more pleasant and exciting, isn’t it?