nitro VS polka

Nitro is a nice https webserver that you can deploy everywhere. Comparing it to express, it doesn't need weird middlewares for json, it has a simple way to support caching, a file system router, tasks and scheduled tasks that avoid quite a few shell scripts, db:migrations etc, plugins, KV storages, SQL connectors, websockets...

Vinxi is really a kind of Meta-Router / Router Manager (built on the dev-server and bundler-toolkit Vite and the http-server Nitro). Vinxi uses various routers of your choosing as a core primitive, and allows you to compose them in a centralized config so that they work together. Be it server or client routers.

Analog allows you to deploy anywhere, literally. It uses Nitro toolkit which has options for anything while working with Vite.

For additional reading, please explore the Nitro docs at: https://nitro.unjs.io

Not to be confused with https://nitro.unjs.io the server tech behind Nuxt and SolidStart

Nuxt is powered by an internal server called Nitro. You can see its manifestation in the terminal console right after you start your local dev server:

Until it support websocket, I think it is simply a no.

https://github.com/unjs/nitro/issues/678

It's 2023 and there is a web framework that "can't" handle websocket at all. (Not even just proxying and doing nothing else.) Feels like a joke to me.

Last week, my first actual contribution into a public open source project has been merged. Its actually only a small changes into Unstorage library, which is used by Nitros server engine, which in turn used by the popular NuxtJs framework. At the time, I was stuck in one of my side project which used Nuxt because Unstorage is lacking some functionalities that I need. However because Unstorage is 2 layers deep in the dependency tree, its not trivial for me to change the code there.

Express.js, with its long-lived version 4 is famous for its somewhat low performance. Other projects like fastify or polka have benchmarks outperforming Express.js. I don’t know why Express is slower, maybe because of regex processing of routes? If you’re using parametric routes like /users/:userid/entity and have no regexp routes, then replacing Express.js with fastify or polka will add a performance boost to your app. They are not direct replacements, but you can convert code if you really need that boost. In the article below benchmarks shows huge improvement, but in reality, your code will be a limiting factor to your app performance, and you are unlikely notice any improvement.

- once released and popular, they cease getting frequent updates

Now, yes this is a generalization. It doesn't apply to all of their packages, and not at the same point in time. But there is a pattern there. Some quick diving into the author's Github account, and their more popular repos shows the pattern. It's also clear that this was a choice made by a Svelte contributor to use their own package for "official" support in Svelte Kit.

When it comes to polka itself, I just don't get why a maturing framework like Svelte would choose something whose only real advantage lies in micro-benchmarking porn [1]. Speculation aside, I'm surprised the Svelte team didn't look at that choice through a lens of higher scrutiny. Koa would have been an infinitely better choice in my personal opinion, and there are several community-driven setups [2][3] for it.

[1] https://github.com/lukeed/polka#benchmarks

[2] https://github.com/kaladivo/svelte-kit-koa-boilerplate

[3] https://blog.logrocket.com/sapper-svelte-tutorial-2021/

Check out polka if you haven’t. It’s far leaner, and faster.

polka link

Sapper, by default, uses polka as the server. I decided to use express instead.

Learn something new every day. This is awesome I could probably use polka instead of express.