redwood VS @databases

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/

At Databases because you don't need ORM.

Depending on the complexity of your queries, Prisma might indeed not be the best abstraction for you. If you're proficient in SQL and don't want to sacrifice type-safety, there are really nice, low-level alternatives to Prisma such as Zapatos, Slonik or atdatabases. We're laying this out in our docs here: Should you use Prisma?

I built https://www.atdatabases.org to make this as easy as possible to get right when querying SQL databases with node.js

Depends a lot on the size of your database records. We’ve found that for a few tables with big JSONB columns it can make a huge difference but for 90% of queries it makes very little difference. https://www.atdatabases.org with @databases/pg-typed or @databases/mysql-typed also keeps the types in sync with which columns you select.

Since the method is marked as async, you can use await to get the results of a query (if your database library supports promises. For example with https://www.atdatabases.org as your db library you could do

I found Prisma close but not quite there. That's part of what motivated me to keep working on https://www.atdatabases.org, which I think is already there as an enterprise ready ORM for node.js

I built https://www.atdatabases.org which has an ORM for node.js, but also supports writing SQL queries in a safe way. It is type safe, and has much simpler & more flexible transaction support than most node.js ORMs.

If you’re using TypeScript and don’t have untrusted user data, @databases can generate static types, which can be a good alternative to runtime validation.

Did either of you consider @databases? It has pretty much the same approach to SQL as Slonik. I’m curious if there’s any reason why Slonik is preferable?