We all know our users pay a cost when we push our JS framework in to their browser. Now, thanks to Tim Kadlec doing the yeoman’s work of crunching the numbers, we can approximate just how much that cost really is.

There is no faster (pun intended) way to slow down a site than to use a bunch of JavaScript. The thing about JavaScript is you end up paying a performance tax no less than four times:

1. The cost of downloading the file on the network
2. The cost of parsing and compiling the uncompressed file once downloaded
3. The cost of executing the JavaScript
4. The memory cost

Thanks to HTTP Archive, we can figure that out.

I’m pretty happy with how sites using jQuery size up. Granted, it’s not really a UI framework like the others are, but you have to imagine that many of those sites also use jQuery UI and their overall cost still compares well to the more modern solutions.

The quality of your thinking depends on your mental framework. To become a better thinker you need to have an understanding of this mental framework and how you view the world. But, what exactly is a mental framework? How have we all been programmed throughout our lives? In what ways have you been programed that you like, don’t like, or want to change? Join us as we explore and examine the key components of developing a mental framework.

Divya and Jerod welcome ZEIT founder Guillermo Rauch to the show for a deep discussion on the state of JAMstack, what’s new & exciting with Next.js, and some big picture analysis of where the industry is heading.

Brandon Bayer:

The central thesis is that most apps don’t need a REST or GraphQL API. Blitz brings back the simplicity of server rendered frameworks like Ruby on Rails while preserving everything we love about React.

Additionally, Blitz is bringing other Rails goodness that’s missing in the React ecosystem like file structure and routing conventions, a really nice console REPL, intelligent code-scaffolding, and a fine-tuned out-of-the-box setup with Prettier, Typescript, ESlint, Jest, Cypress, etc.

The framework ‘wars’ continue right alongside the monolith-vs-microservices debate. For more on the principles behind Blitz, check out the manifesto.

Tom Preston-Werner (co-founder of GitHub, board member at Netlify) joins the party and brings his new, opinionated, full-stack, serverless web app framework with him. Will Redwood help usher in the future Tom predicted back in 2018? We discuss that and a whole lot more on this must-listen episode.

Follow along with Christine Dodrill as she makes a small HTTP service using Rust and Rocket. This can also serve as a new Rust project primer too.

This is how I start a new Rust project. I put all of the code described in this post in this GitHub repo in case it helps. Have fun and be well.

I know the Go community isn’t one for frameworks, but as a long time framework user myself, I’ve never quite understood the resistance. Fiber doesn’t hide the ball. It comes right out and says “this is a web framework written in Go”. Here’s the philosophy behind that:

New gophers that make the switch from Node.js to Go are dealing with a learning curve before they can start building their web applications or microservices. Fiber, as a web framework, was created with the idea of minimalism and follow UNIX way, so that new gophers can quickly enter the world of Go with a warm and trusted welcome.

Fiber is inspired by Express, the most popular web framework on the Internet. We combined the ease of Express and raw performance of Go. If you have ever implemented a web application on Node.js (using Express or similar), then many methods and principles will seem very common to you.

Rete is a modular framework for visual programming. Rete allows you to create node-based editor directly in the browser. You can define nodes and workers that allow users to create instructions for processing data in your editor without a single line of code.

Metaflow is a joint effort by Netflix and AWS that attempts to solve the discrepancy between what data scientists care about and what they spend their time doing (pictured below). Get the backstory on Netflix’s technology blog.

KBall, Divya, and Chris talk about what’s going on in all the big frontend frameworks, share some pro tips, and shout out awesome people and things in the community.

Mat Ryer, Mark Bates, Johnny Boursiquot, and Aaron Schlesinger discuss web development in Go. Go is great at writing server technology, but how good is it for web development? We’ll talk about HTTP, templating, the front-end, Wasm, and we even discuss Buffalo with its creator, Mark Bates.

Typescene is a robust front end library written in TypeScript: strongly typed, no dependencies, no nonsense. It’s really great for desktop-like (or mobile) applications, not so great for blogs and other content. It isn’t backed by some major corporation, not even a startup, but it’s been built by me: one developer on a mission to build a no-nonsense dependency-less framework

The author’s journey is noteworthy, but if you’re mostly wanting to know if this particular framework speaks to you, jump directly to its list of goals.

Flutter for web is a code-compatible implementation of Flutter that is rendered using standards-based web technologies: HTML, CSS and JavaScript. With Flutter for web, you can compile existing Flutter code written in Dart into a client experience that can be embedded in the browser and deployed to any web server. You can use all the features of Flutter, and you don’t need a browser plug-in.

This means Flutter is now on mobile, web, desktop, and embedded systems. What surprises me is how dedicated to Dart Google seems to be, despite community malaise and the success of TypeScript.

After several months of being just days away, we are over the moon to announce the stable release of Svelte 3. This is a huge release representing hundreds of hours of work by many people in the Svelte community, including invaluable feedback from beta testers who have helped shape the design every step of the way.

Lots of folks (myself included) have been eagerly awaiting this release after Rich teed it up on The Changelog #332. We’d love to hear your first impressions!

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before…the difference is DeskGap leverages the operating system‘s webview instead of baking a browser in with it (like Electron).

DeskGap is a framework for building cross-platform desktop apps with web technologies (JavaScript, HTML and CSS).

To enable native capabilities while keeping the size down, DeskGap bundles a Node.js runtime and leaves the HTML rendering to the operating system‘s webview.

When you hard-attach your library to a specific technology or framework, you limit its potential impact. By thinking ahead and putting in a little more effort, your library could benefit orders of magnitudes more people.

Jerod and Adam talked with Rich Harris –a JavaScript Journalist on The New York Times Investigations team– about his magical disappearing UI framework called Svelte. We compare and contrast Svelte to React, how the framework is embedded in a component, build time vs. run time, scoping CSS to components, and CSS in JavaScript. Rich also shares where Svelte v3 is heading and the details on Sapper, a framework for building extremely high-performance progressive web apps, powered by Svelte.

I’ve been using Semantic UI for years. Still do to this day. Unfortunately, the project hasn’t been sustainable with a BDFL despite Jack Lukic’s efforts (you can read a lot more on that history right here).

These things happen. And when they do, it’s awesome to see the community rally around the project and keep it alive and thriving. That’s exactly the case with Fomantic UI. Let’s be clear: this is no hostile takeover. From the README:

NOTE: Fomantic was created to continue active development of Semantic-UI and has the intent to be merged back into the master repository once active development can restart.

Let’s hope the two can become one flesh at some point in the future. In the meantime, Fomantic is where the action’s at.

Elixir gets its very own UI framework focused on connected devices (IoT). Scenic apps run identically across operating systems, including MacOS, Ubuntu, Nerves/Linux, and more.

Notably, Scenic does not use any browser technologies. Learn all about it in Boyd Multerer’s ElixirConf 2018 talk.

Umi is based on routing, supports next.js-like conventional routing, and various advanced routing functions, such as routing-level on-demand loading. Then with a complete plugin system, covering every life cycle from source code to build product, umi is able to support various functional extensions and business needs, currently umi have almost 50+ plugins in both community and inside company.

The aim of Bash Infinity is to maximize readability of bash scripts, minimize the amount of code repeat and create a central repository for a well-written, and a well-tested standard library for bash.

It seems to me that by the time you need something as fancy/full-featured as this, maybe the task at hand has outgrown Bash? Cool, nonetheless. 👍

Masonite works hard to be fast and easy from install to deployment so developers can go from concept to creation in as quick and efficiently as possible. Use it for your next SaaS! Try it once and you’ll fall in love.

KBall, on Vue’s ⭐️ count surpassing React’s:

Don’t get me wrong, I love Vue - I’ve been using it far more than React recently - but github stars are more of a measure of the “hipness” of a project than its actual use.

He backs that up by citing the preposterously low number of stars ‘earned’ by the Apache web server, which powers ~38% of websites. What is a useful metric, then?

There is no perfect measure - there are many many ways to install and use any of these projects - but NPM has become the de facto standard for installing JavaScript packages. If we look at download statistics for the core package of each of these frameworks - the vue package and the react package, that should give us a reasonable proxy for actual use.

Click through for his detailed findings, but the big takeaway is right there 👆 in the headline.

Well, Gatsby is officially a startup! They just announced the formation of Gatsby Inc. and have raised a $3.8M seed round to fund the effort. Wow, congrats Kyle and team.

Kyle Matthews writes on the Gatsby blog:

I’m thrilled to announce the formation of Gatsby Inc. Based on the open source project Gatsby I founded, Gatsby the company will make feature-rich and blazing-fast websites easier to build and run.

What is Gatsby?

Gatsby is…

• a blazing fast static site generator for React.js
• a powerful and flexible modern website framework that simplifies every step of starting, developing and running websites
• helps you leverage open source innovations in the React, NPM, and Gatsby communities for your web projects
• lets you pull data into pages from WordPress, Drupal, Contentful, markdown—and any other data source you can imagine
• compiles and optimizes your site’s code to make your sites lightning fast—even on mobile

This is a lot like Ruby on Rails (even with ActiveSupport & ActiveRecord built-in), but instead of views you have replies. It works for both voice-based and text-based bots and has NLP offerings baked in too. 🍰

The only bummer is that service integrations are currently limited to Facebook Messenger and Twilio SMS. That’s pretty normal for a new open source offering, though, and it’s a great place to hop in and contribute. ✊