My company is building a B2B ordering system. We take reservations and store fulfillment details with some email and SMS functionality bolted on to a web interface; at least for now it’s a simple business CRUD app. We chose to use Vue for the frontend and Python REST APIs on the backend. And it has been thoroughly frustrating to just ship our MVP, because when I look into our frontend codebase, more than half of it is a bunch of API calls, state management, authentication, and error handling that honestly does not provide much value to the product that we’re offering. I half wish that we had built this in Rails or Django.
Except, we are geospatial-enabled and have a killer interactive map view that powers this whole thing. And it’s not just a single asset-tracking view, but this map component is going to be embedded in several places across the app. And when you zoom, pan, or search the relevant data on screen is updated. I wouldn’t dare try to build this in anything other than one of the big 3 SPA frameworks today.
Why do I have to choose between a traditional app with poor ergonomics for developing frontend JS, and a clunky SPA that reinvents everything the browser has gotten good at in the last 20 years? Remix is a hybrid and I think they are on to something really great here. I can write my server side models and controllers as in days of yore and pass them straight to a renderer that happens to be full blown React + React Router that does as many fancy interactive things on the frontend as I wish once the page is hydrated.
I think it’s easy for backend devs to discount how nice it is to use JSX across the stack if they’re used to a templating language and writing JS sprinkles to manipulate the DOM. And it’s easy for frontend devs to discount how much extra work it is to create an API when your team is only using it internally for a first-party app, because you need APIs for SPAs. But once you realize that you can eliminate these entire bodies of work (manipulating the DOM and writing an unnecessary API), you get the best of both worlds and everything about complicated web dev today feels so achievable.
Even if it’s early days yet, and Remix can’t hold a candle to comprehensive frameworks like Rails, this is much more than just Sinatra or Flask written in JS. I’m seriously excited about where Remix is headed and I’m rooting for these guys all the way.