remote-standalone VS qwik

I published this article on Template Animation (aka DOM Templating) 12 years ago:

https://benkoworks.com/your-templating-engine-sucks-and-ever...

It fits nicely with this goal. My colleagues and I created a tool that allows HTML developers to work in HTML by compiling HTML using a Chrome extension, and then allowing developers to compile the same in their code platform of choice and operate on the DOM:

https://github.com/iaindooley/Fragmentify

https://github.com/iaindooley/fragmentify-js

Even if you're doing a SPA you can use this same method, by sending updates over the wire and doing the processing on the server. We created a standalone package that facilitated that by loading the initial page from the server then transparently allowing the server to send just the changes to the page and having them applied on the client side:

https://github.com/dgrinton/remote-standalone

The combination of "remote" and "fragmentify" and Template Animation/DOM Templating, in my opinion, would be a tremendous "retreat to move forward" in web development technologies.

Many years ago a colleague and I wrote a stand-alone version of a package for my own arcane php framework called Remote.

The idea was that you write in Web 1.0 and immediately get a Web 2.0 front end because it just updates what it needs to.

I still think this is the holy grail of frontends:

https://github.com/dgrinton/remote-standalone

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).