proposal-built-in-modules VS redwood

There is proposal for stdlib, but it will take some time until (if ever) it will reach stage 4.

The working group most in charge of JS is ECMA's TC-39 (TC => Technical Committee) [0]. They've been taking a very deliberate, slow path to expanding the "standard" library because they take a very serious view of backwards compatibility on the web. Some proposals were shifted because of conflicts with ancient versions of things like MooTools still out in the wild, for instance. (This was the so-called "Smooshgate" incident [1].)

This may speed up a bit if the Built-In Modules proposal [2] passes, which would add a deliberate `import` URL for standard modules which would give a cleaner expansion point for new standard libraries over adding more global variables or further expanding the base prototypes (Object.prototype, Array.prototype, etc) in ways that increasingly likely have backwards compatibility issues.

TC-39 works all of their proposals in the open on Github [3] and it can be a fascinating process to watch if you are interested in the language's future direction.

[0] https://tc39.es/

[1] https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2018/03/smooshgate

[2] https://github.com/tc39/proposal-built-in-modules

[3] https://github.com/tc39/proposals

There is a TC39 proposal for a "Javascript Standard Library." It's at stage 1, which is better than stage 0.

https://github.com/tc39/proposal-built-in-modules

The standard library is a tough one. There is a proposal for built-in modules but it is very early days and miles away from what is needed. Clojure ships with functions that make the likes of Lodash and Ramda redundant. I think for a dynamic language an extensive library of functions for manipulating collections is essential. It is a real thing that once dynamic language codebases grow too big, they become a challenge to maintain. Therefore having functions that do a lot of common tasks for you mitigates that issue. Paired with immutability, lots of code just becomes data passing through pipelines, giving less surface area for bugs and making everything more concise and declarative.

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/