Ciro Santilli's minor projects Updated +Created
These are some smaller projects that Ciro Santilli carried out. They are all either for fun, or misguided use of his time done by an younger self:
gothinkster/realworld Updated +Created
Basically puts together every backend with Front-end web framework to create the exact same website.
The reference live demo can be found at: demo.realworld.io/#/ It is based on Angular.js as it links to: github.com/gothinkster/angularjs-realworld-example-app TODO backend?
There are however also live demos of other frontends, e.g.:
Note that all those frontends communicate with the same backend.
As of 2021 Devs are seemed a bit too focused on monetizing the project through their "how to use this project" premium tutorial, and documentation could be better: just getting the hello world of the most popular backend with the most popular frontend is not easy... come on.
github.com/gothinkster/realworld/issues/578 asks for community support, as devs have moved on since unfortunately.
Remember:
  • by default, the frontends hardcode the upstream public data API: https://conduit.productionready.io/api so you have to hack their code to match the port of the backend. And each backend can have a different port.
  • when you switch between backends, you must first manually clear client-side storage cookies/local new run will fail due to authentication issues!
Important missing things from the minimum base app:
First you should the most popular backend/frontend combination running, which is the most likely to be working. We managed to run on Ubuntu 20.10, React + Node.js Express.js as described at github.com/gothinkster/node-express-realworld-example-app/pull/116:
Then just:
npm install
npm start
on both server and client, and then visit the client URL: localhost:4100/
One cool thing is that the main repo has unified backend API tests:
git clone https://github.com/gothinkster/realworld
cd realworld
git checkout e7adc6b06b459e578d7d4a6738c1c050598ba431
cd api
APIURL=http://localhost:3000/api USERNAME="u$(date +%s)" ./run-api-tests.sh
so the per-repository tests are basically useless, and that single test can test everything for any backend! There is no frontend testing however: github.com/gothinkster/realworld/issues/269 so newb.
Next.js Updated +Created
Framework built on top of React.
Officially recommended by React[ref]:
Recommended Toolchains
If you’re building a server-rendered website with Node.js, try Next.js.
Basically what this does is to get server-side rendering just working by React, including hydration, which is a good thing.
Next.js sends the first pre-rendered HTML page along with the JavaScript code. Then, JavaScript page switches just load the API data.
Next.js does this nicely by forcing you to provide page data in a serialized JSON format, even when rendering server-side (e.g. the return value of getServerSideProps). This way, it is also able to provide either the full HTML, or just the JSON.
Some general downsides:
  • it does feel like they don't document deployment very well however, especially non-Vercel options, which is the company behind Next.js. I'm unable to find how to use a non Vercel CDN with ISR supposing that is possible.
  • Next.js is very opinionated, and like any opinionated library it is sometimes hard to know why something is/isn't happening, and sometimes it is hard/impossible to do what you want with it unless they add support. They have done good progress, but even as of 2022, some aspects just feel so immature, some major-looking use cases are not very well done.
In theory, Next.js could be the "ultimate frontend framework". It does have a lot of development difficulties that need to be ironed out, but the general concepts, and things it tries to integrate, including e.g. webpack, TypeScript, etc. are good. Maybe the question is when will someone put it together with an amazing backend library and dominate and finally put an end to the infinite number of Js Frameworks!
In order to offer its amazing features, Next.js is also extremely opinionated, which means that if something wasn't designed to be possible, it basically isn't.
No prerender with custom server? It forces you to write your API with next as well? Or does it mean something else?
TODO can it statically generate pages that are created at runtime? E.g. if I create a new blog post, will it automatically upload a static page? It seems that yes, and that this is exactly what Incremental Static Regeneration means:However, Ciro can't find any mention of how to specify where the pages are uploaded to... this is pat of the non-Vercel deployment problem.
Can't ISR prerenter by URL query parameters:That plus the requirement to have one page per file under pages/ leads to a lot of useless duplication, because then you are forced to place the URL parameters on the pathnames.
"Module not found: Can't resolve 'fs'" Hell. The main reason this happens seems to be the that in a higher order component, webpack can't determine if callbacks use the require or not to remove it from frontend code. Fully investigated and solved at:
Overviews: