pothos VS redwood

A project I maintain Pothos uses a global namespace with a bunch of interfaces to allow plugins to extend interfaces defined in core or other plugins. This allows plugins to add new options and methods to objects and classes without the other packages needing to know anything about them.

I noticed this being shared around on Twitter the other day - pretty handy, as I'm currently trying to architect a similar experience for my job using Pathos and graphql-codegen.

- tRPC

But I'd likely throw out Clerk a cheaper option:

- Supertokens, and also since Supertokens is easy (lots of enthusiastic reports about it), has a managed solution (which is cheaper than the alternatives), is secure and scalable (rotating refresh tokens with JWTs), open source, has magic links, and the architecture of Supertokens would allow me to simply and quickly eject to self-hosting it if/when I'd eventually need to (if the app ever reaches mass-market scale).

And I might throw out tRPC for the equivalent GraphQL experience (esp. if business strategy dictates I need a 3rd party API):

- GQty.dev on the client, for inferred queries/mutations. For rapid dev speed. Simple code example: https://gqty.dev/docs/intro Then move to URQL or Relay at scale, or just skip GQty and go with URQL from the start (if scalability trumps dev speed).

- Pothos http://pothos-graphql.dev on the server, for auto building the schema from your TS code (aka. code-first). Better than Nexus (e.g. Max Stoiber moved from Nexus to Pothos on his Bedrock starter template because Pothos is best in class: https://bedrock.mxstbr.com/tools/pothos/ ).

And I might throw out NextJS (Webpack) for the equivalent experience in Vite:

- vite-plugin-ssr, since both architectural control (libraries > frameworks) and Vite rocks. I'd likely then have to make solito-vite https://github.com/nandorojo/solito/discussions/157 to have a unified navigation between React Native and Web, but Solito is allegely tiny, so recreating it should be doable.

(If doing all of these replacements, maybe starting from scratch would be easier than modifying create-universal-app ... That said, I think if someone made a starter repo with the above choices it would be a real killer!)

Then I'd also likely use:

- Vercel (and try their Edge Functions, for a serverless sweet v8 isolates experience without slow cold starts), or maybe Cloudflare Workers (cheaper, slightly more hassle?) for hosting.

- Planetscale or Supabase for the DB. (Not brave enough to try EdgeDB or SurrealDB just yet, though EdgeDB is close..) Unless I had a specific use case where a more specialized/optimized DB would make sense.

This stack should stick even post-MVP, as it's not only optimized for a solo developer but for scalability.

Have you used Pothos? It's a way to make GraphQL schemas in TypeScript, in a type-safe way. So the creator of Prisma Client Rust is thinking about making a Pothos-style API based on the t builder pattern:

I would recommend Pothos (https://pothos-graphql.dev/) as a more modern alternative to typegraphql or nexus.

Depends on language, I've build GraphQL servers in a few, though mostly JavaScript and Python. For Python I used to use Graphene, these days I use Strawberry.

For JavaScript, I originally used graphql-js and express-graphql, as these were the original libraries and I was a literal day 1 adopter. All the libraries are essentially just wrappers around graphql-js, so it's still viable to use directly. But for schema-building I now use Pothos (https://pothos-graphql.dev/), I'd probably use graphql-helix as the http layer (https://github.com/contra/graphql-helix).

Pothos is a breeze of fresh air when it comes to building GraphQL APIs. It is a library that lets you write code-first GraphQL APIs with an emphasis on pluggability and type safety. And it has an awesome Prisma integration! (I am genuinely excited about this one, it makes my life so much easier.)

In today's article we are going to create a GraphQL api using the Koa framework together with the GraphQL Yoga library and Pothos. In addition, we will use Kysely, which is a query builder entirely written in TypeScript.

If you're a GraphQL developer, Pothos is the best example - all your user-defined types just fits in it like a glove 99% of the time. It definitely makes the most use of TS generics.

https://pothos-graphql.dev/

(I'm a bit sleepy, so this is the main one I can think of at the moment that I really enjoy using.)

Frameworks are a theme with this month's Release Radar, so here's another. Redwood is a full-stack, JavaScript/TypeScript web application, designed to scale with you. It uses React frontend for the frontend and links to a custom GraphQL API for the backend. The latest version includes a bunch of breaking changes such as moving to Node 20.0, the Redwood Studio, and highly requested GraphQL features such as Realtime, Fragments, and Trusted Documents, the server file, new router hooks, and heaps more. If you've previously used Redwood, you'll probably want to upgrade to version 7.0. The team have put together a handy migration guide for you to follow.

The other piece of important information to acknowledge here is that when we say RSCs need a framework, “framework” effectively just means “Next.js.” There are some smaller frameworks (like Waku) that support RSCs. There are also some larger and more established frameworks (like Redwood) that have plans to support RSCs or (like Gatsby) only support RSCs in beta. We will likely see this change once we get React 19 and RSCs are part of the Stable version. However, for now, Next.js is currently the only framework recommended in the official React docs that supports server components.

Although there are quite a few opinionated battery-included frameworks that have picked up everything for you like RedwoodJS, Blitz, and Create-T3-App, you still need to choose between them and hope that they will remain mainstream and well-maintained in the future. So how should we choose?

Web development frameworks in JavaScript, such as NextJS and RedwoodJS, have gained popularity among developers. Choosing the right framework, library, or tool for a project is crucial for efficient development. Developers often seek the best tools to save time and avoid reinventing the wheel.

The community here is pretty friendly. https://redwoodjs.com/

Next.js 13 ignited the first wave of attention to React Server Components (RSC) around the end of last year. Over time, other frameworks, like Remix and RedwoodJS, have also started to put RSC into their future road maps. However, the entire "moving computation to the server-side" direction of React/Next.js has been highly controversial from the very beginning.

I'm currently experimenting with the fantastic Redwood framework. However, while going through the excellent tutorial, I didn't find any guidance on using data validation libraries like Yup, Zod, Vest, etc. So, I had to do some investigation and came up with a solution. This article describes the implementation of validation with Zod in a fresh Redwood app. You can find the sources at this github repository.

RBAC is one of the most common authorization models - users are assigned different roles, and resource access privileges are controlled at the role level. Despite its limitations, RBAC is a popular choice for simple applications, and some frameworks (like RedwoodJS) have built-in support for it.

Check it out here: https://redwoodjs.com/