enhance.dev VS qwik

We are excited to present our non-trivial learning application, Enhance Movies, designed to highlight the exceptional web development experience you get from Enhance. Our movies app is built with Enhance and The Movie Database API. With a strong focus on simplicity, performance, progressive enhancement, and offline local development capabilities, this application is set to transform your understanding of what can be done by focusing on the web platform.

Those of you who’ve visited the Enhance website recently may have noticed a big change: we launched our first proper landing page! Although this project was primarily my baby over the last couple months, a lot of other folks were involved — from the stellar (and heartwarming) design & illustrations by Dani Raskovsky, to art and content direction by our very own kj, and additional ideas and feedback from the rest of the Begin team. We’re all thrilled to have this project out in the world, and we hope you’re as delighted as we are with it.

Enhance is relatively new, even compared to some of the newer tools we're talking about in this post, having been released in August 2022. It is an application framework that supports server-side rendering via Lambda functions.

Once you’re familiar with the basics (or if you are already and want to take them further), Web Components offer a standards based methodology for creating custom reusable components. As previously mentioned, Web Components require JavaScript to run in the browser by default, and their class based interface can take some getting used to. Enhance, our HTML first framework, steps around this issue by providing you with a standards compliant way to render custom elements on the server, only requiring you to interface with the Web Components JavaScript API when progressive enhancement is called for. Plus, we’ve got a really cute mascot. Give Enhance a try today!

There are so many remarkable new approaches like Astro, Qwik, 11ty and Enhance built around HTML-first promise that leverages the platform. If you decide to try out Enhance, please let us know what you think, as we’d love the feedback. Follow us on Mastodon and join our Discord.

In Part 1 of this series we covered the HTML first solution to uploading files. In this we have made some small improvements with JavaScript. The full example repository with the code in this post can be found here: https://github.com/ryanbethel/thumbnail-upload-example. Try out enhance.dev for your next project. It has pretty much everything you need to build a functional web app.

To solve the scroll jumping we can monitor the scrollTop setting for the sidebar and restore that location if we reload the page. Enhance.dev uses custom elements to build reusable components. The is one of those components. One of the benefits of custom elements is that we can easily attach JavaScript progressive enhancement behavior in a script tag defining that element.

https://enhance.dev is really powerful. Can do **way** more than a lot of the current frameworks with much less code.

Similarly to Promises/A+, this effort focuses on aligning the JavaScript ecosystem. If this alignment is successful, then a standard could emerge, based on that experience. Several framework authors are collaborating here on a common model which could back their reactivity core. The current draft is based on design input from the authors/maintainers of Angular, Bubble, Ember, FAST, MobX, Preact, Qwik, RxJS, Solid, Starbeam, Svelte, Vue, Wiz, and more…

Each app’s front end is built with Qwik and uses Tailwind for styling. The server-side is powered by Qwik City (Qwik’s official meta-framework) and runs on Node.js hosted on a shared Linode VPS. The apps also use PM2 for process management and Caddy as a reverse proxy and SSL provisioner. The data is stored in a PostgreSQL database that also runs on a shared Linode VPS. The apps interact with the database using Drizzle, an Object-Relational Mapper (ORM) for JavaScript. The entire infrastructure for both apps is managed with Terraform using the Terraform Linode provider, which was new to me, but made provisioning and destroying infrastructure really fast and easy (once I learned how it all worked).

If you want to see the framework that does it right, check out Qwik.

Incredibly small JS / CSS bundles. Only loads what it needs.

https://qwik.dev/

So here at Builder.io, my first task was to ensure that we migrated our site from Next.js to Qwik with a 100% pixel match. We aimed to utilize the power of Qwik to enhance our site's performance to unprecedented levels.

That was the last straw; cumulatively, I had spent more time looking for something to do than actually doing it. But I really wanted to contribute! So a few more months went by, until one day I met an Italian open source maintainer and long-time speaker, Giorgio Boa, who by the way was a guest on our podcast Continuous Delivery, and asked him for advice, saying that I wanted to be part of the OS world. He said he was working on a small library of Qwik components and could help me if I wanted. I gladly accepted, and we found an issue that seemed pretty straightforward. A few days after our conversation, I followed the little README guide to install everything required, and...nothing worked. So, after a few bad words, a lot of doubt about my skills as an engineer, and self pep talks to overcome my shyness about asking for help, I contacted Giorgio again. Even with his help, at first we had some trouble figuring out what was going wrong, but in the end I finally had a working setup.

In the previous post, we got AI generated jokes into our Qwik application from OpenAI API. It worked, but the user experience suffered because we had to wait until the API completed the entire response before updating the client.

In this series, we’ll learn how to integrate OpenAI‘s AI services into an application built with Qwik, a JavaScript framework focused on the concept of resumability (this will be relevant to understand later).