But I do agree they are the best option if you hate or can’t pay or aren’t allowed to use apple products.

It baffles me when I see single developer or small team projects going for this.

Certainly tying together libraries (or writing your own framework) is a valid approach, it's just a lot more expensive to reach the same quality level. That's why usually you end up with half assed solutions or never ending projects.

Such a basic building block seems to be fading away nowadays, even some times presented as a "novel" thing or a "feature" (eg: remix)

As soon as you have to work on both sides of the API, it is not and advantage anymore.

I think separating the backend from the frontend is a way to increase the amount of work required in order to gain a saner way to split it into chunks for different teams.

As a single person, or a small team, doing an SPA and an API only backend, if not done for learning purposes then it is just either madness or CV padding, or something else....makes no sense at all to me.

I've seen microservices that had absolutely no guardrais going off the hill too many times. At my previous job "migrations" where bash scripts with SQL in them because they "didn't like ORMs and they were slow". LOL. They were handling signup form POSTs and profile updates.

That's when you realise using what would be a perfect framework for building landing pages might not be the best one to build a full web application.

Unpoly handles everything that requires what in SPA world would be an "API call", the difference is that the response I get is just the HTML with the data already rendered and which is dynamically updated in the DOM. Also Modals and page transitions Turbolinks style are handled by Unpoly.

Alpine handles everything that doesn't require a server API call, such as form wizards steps, dropdowns, tables filtering, sidebars, buttons loading/disabled states, etc.

The end result, the application "feels" like Github.

https://blog.jannikwempe.com/debunking-tailwind-counterargum...

https://www.swyx.io/why-tailwind

And many similar ones.

Everyone says this, which doesn't solve anything. 99,9% of what we build is just something in between. It is not as easy as you make it look like.

I've been working for 20 years on this, last 8 ~ 9 only with node and React and not a single time, other than sharing some validation rules and/or for SSR, got anything useful out of having the possibility of running the same code in the browser and on the server... totally different responsibilities, libraries, requirements and environments.

/s

SSR per se is not a "big problem", specially if using something like Next. The problem comes when you have to mix in translations, i18n, data fetching from external sources, authentication, cookies forwarding, etc, etc, etc... in my opinion complexity grows so exponentially that I don't see the advantage anymore.

I'm working on a project built with Laravel + Tailwind + Unpoly + Alpine and it is such a walk in the park to implement anything thrown at us. Although it is not "cool" tech, so some people around here don't want to work on it because they only want React all the things :-s

I'd still take the discovering of an advanced civilization any day.

Not saying this is the case here but highly likely.

Definitely wouldn't go the fancy SPA serverlerss lambda jamstack microservices route.

[1] https://tallstack.dev/

[2] https://dokku.com/