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Everything's changed. Will I use React again?

· 5 min read
Keith Howling
Keith Howling
Apps in the cloud

Starting a new Project in 2024​

Vite

Time to build a ChatGPT app to learn how to develop solutions with a new, unified, user experiance. This will be a feed based UI with a form with 1 input fixed at the bottom, the scrolling feed rendering results both from chatGPT and Mongo. Sounds like a SPA, something like this:

So, let get it, starting with my trusty tech stack: React, Node/Typescript, Mongo. Recent times I've added tRPC & zod

tip

This makes the server/browser development as simple as possible, same language, same types, in fact I'm a big advocate of "Complexity Kills" even in the enterprise, so I try not to abstract, inject, complicate unless necessary. I've stayed clear of graphQL that's been a good call so far.

Everything has Changed​

looking into recent release of React to iterate my stack with the latest updates, I see big changes. The last big update was hooks, and I loved them, so lets dive in!

tip

Big fan of the OSS team at Facebook, I see so much great tech coming from them. I started using client frameworks with Angular1.x back in the day, as I thought I could rely on google for webdev guidence, but, oh my god, what a mess, I spent 80% of the time understand the framework, and 20% building my app, then the Angular2 upgrades, ugh. I haven't used any google OSS projects since (aside from Kubernetes now in CNCF), but I hear the latest Angular is much improved.

create-react-app is no longer recommended, looks like everyone is using Vite for SPAs, and also, the biggest change of all, React has become a Server Side framework!

Vite​

Ok, Vite it is! It actually turned out to be a great drop-in replacement for create-react-app, I don’t need to change my workflow, and everything is faster. So let's go!

2 days later, I realise this is no longer great choice for my app. Although it’s a SPA, I have hit 2 big issues:

  • The input needs to be POSTed to the server, and the resulting server message needs to be appended to the scrolling feed, I guess I will useState hook with an array of messages for the feed items, this will only ever get appended to, feels like this will slow down as this gets bigger and bigger. So do I useEffect for my main UI component, essentially bypassing react making it a leaky abstraction?
  • tRPC doesn’t appear to handle chunked http responses from chatGPT, so that abstraction is going to leak too & I'll need to build code around it.

OK, so as we are going to be doing a lot of calls to the server for each render, this is the time for React Server Components, yes, let's go, I'm excited!

NextJs​

OK, more reading later, to use React Server Components (that look awesome), I now need a Meta-framework?, cannot just use React anymore. Ok, Next.js looks like the frontrunner.

warning

I was a little apprehensive about this, Next belongs to Vercel, that looks to be an opinionated cloud hosting provider . I want to deploy to non-opinionated service on a hyper-scale cloud, so concerned the Next roadmap will be focused on getting it to run really well on Vercel, or its edge. This is not my use-case.

Anyway, let's get stuck in! 2 days later, I realise this is no longer a great choice for my app. I thought I could append server components into the feed, allowing me to use await on the server to query mongo or chatGPT and returning html via JSX to append into the feed, but, I hit 2 big issues:

  • "You cannot import a Server Component into a Client Component" & "Server Components don’t have lifecycle events (hooks / effects / refs etc)" This is massive No matter how I tried to architect my app, I hit a brick wall. I couldn’t append Server Components to my feed UI Client Component. I couldn’t turn the feed into a Server Component because it needed state.
  • I didn’t really want or need a filesystem based router

So I made everything a Client component, and using the API Routes for fetching the server data. It worked, but what value was NextJs now. I wasn’t happy, this was shambles!

​

2 days later, I saw a youtube video on </> htmx. The DOM swapping beforeend directive jumped out at me, this looked like all I needed! But, I could build a webapp without React components, JSX

Turns out I could! And 2 days in, it works, its simple, event using SSE for the chunked chatGPT streaming responses!

I'm sticking with this, lets see how all the other features go, but I have high hopes....

So, whats next?​

My end-2-end tech stack has completely revolved around javascript/typescript for years, I know it very well and I'm fast at getting prototyes out the door. I need types, they reduce so many bugs/typeos, but I do have a lot of pain with Typescript though, always seem to be fighting with module / import issues etc.

But now, if I no longer need Javascript for client logic, do I stick with it on the server? do I build my server in GO, maybe even .net8, what is the best templating engine?

My world is turning upside down….