Fresh Looks Cool!

When Node became popular, I never understood the hype around server-side JavaScript, other than that it took what had before then been mostly client-side and making it usable on the server.

But the pitfalls of writing large systems on the server without type checking seemed too great. And I wasn't that fond of JavaScript at the time.

By the time I got around to playing with Node more seriously, TypeScript was a thing. In FeoBlog I wanted to write a browser-based client that would both be a nice UI and a great demo of the client/server capabilities of the system. I chose Svelte as my UI toolkit, and I very much enjoy the features it offers. However, bundling JavaScript for the browser is still a pain to get working. And if you ship everything as a Single-Page Application, you lose out on indexing, and old/underpowered browsers.

FeoBlog actually has remnants of an early server-side template system which it falls back on for that purpose, but you lose out on a lot of features, and it's lost parity with the new Svelte UI. It would be nice if I could write code once and have it render on the server OR the client.

So now I'm starting to see the appeal of server-side JS. But... I don't really want to run Node. Thankfully there's Deno, which I've already enjoyed writing some scripts for.

AND, there's a cool new web framework called Fresh. It's got the same super-fast dev cycle that I've enjoyed with Deno, and the result is code that can render things on the server OR client.

If you want to see a(n incidental) demo of Fresh, take a look at Deno Deploy: Crazy Fast Cloud Functions - Architecture Speedun, which is where I first discovered it.

Looking forward to see where this goes!