starfx VS mui-toolpad

Ah! A real criticism of FE development, I agree with your problem statement.

When you jump into the world of single-page applications, things get complex pretty quickly, because the use case for needing an SPA pushes the web app into a full desktop application.

Ultimately, for a highly interactive and dynamic "desktop-class" user experience, there is added complexity. I think that's why so much movement within the FE world has moved away from "SPA for everything" and into these mixed dynamic apps. Islands, React Server Components, NextJS, they all help create a middleground between a document-based website with no dynamic elements with a full blown desktop app experience. They all have real tradeoffs, in particular adding an entirely new backend service to serve the front end.

For many projects, react + react-query is probably enough.

Having said that, my argument from https://bower.sh/dogma-of-restful-api still stands: when you build an API that is RESTful (1:1 mapping between endpoint and entity) you are unknowingly pushing the complexity of data synchronization to the FE, which requires a well thought out ETL pipeline.

This probably doesn't help my case but I've been building a simplified middle-layer for react to bridge the gap between react-query and full blown SPA: https://starfx.bower.sh

`redux-saga` maintainer here.

I've been using `effection` to build a replacement for `redux-saga` over at https://github.com/neurosnap/starfx

Effection has demonstrated to me how truly powerful delimited continuations are and why structured concurrency is an incredible asset for anything that requires async flow control -- basically everything in TS/JS.

I know sometimes it's hard to imagine why someone would need structured concurrency or care about delimited continuations for a front-end application, but this is a game changer in terms of expressing async flow control.

Some things to note about Effection:

- API surface area is small https://github.com/thefrontside/effection/issues/851

- It tries to stay as close to JS constructs as possible so it will feel very familiar

- Resource cleanup is automatic (when a function passes out of scope all descendent tasks are shut down automatically)

- End-user doesn't need to think about delimited continuations

The only leap users need to "deal with" coming from async/await is the syntax.

    import { main, call } from "effection";

- https://github.com/thefrontside/continuation

- https://github.com/thefrontside/effection/tree/v3

- https://github.com/neurosnap/starfx

The last one intends to replace redux-saga using DCs.

Here’s a presentation I gave recently talking about DCs in typescript: https://youtu.be/uRbqLGj_6mI?si=XI0JNMKMoO2VHMvM

A couple of us have been experimenting with deliminited continuations and I think it’s gonna take off soon:

https://youtu.be/uRbqLGj_6mI?si=kgKKjpCnehJ9bpIG

https://github.com/neurosnap/starfx

I feel the same way which is why I decided to help maintain the project. Async flow control is very tricky even in js–land. Having watchers live inside of a while-loop is a powerful construct that lends itself to interest flow control patterns.

I'm also in the process of rebuilding redux-saga but without the redux part: https://github.com/neurosnap/starfx

It's still in alpha stage, but it is very reminiscent of redux-saga.

This seems to mainly be useful for spinning up quick and dirty internal tools.

But for that use-case, isn't it easier to use something visual and established like Retool (https://retool.com/) or that generates nice react code, like MUI Toolpad (https://mui.com/toolpad/)?

How does it stack up against MUI's Toolpad? (https://mui.com/toolpad/)

All things considered, they seem pretty similar - visual UI to generate React code that works alongside existing codebase, open-source & self-hostable, etc.

- All configuration is stored in local files which you can version-control, edit, and deploy in any way you want.

You can check out our live demo [1]. If you find it useful, you can support us by giving a star on GitHub [2]. We released our public beta [3] this week. We are happy to answer any questions/feedback in the comments.

[1]: https://stackblitz.com/fork/github/mui/mui-toolpad/tree/mast...

[2]: https://github.com/mui/mui-toolpad

[3]: https://mui.com/blog/2023-toolpad-beta-announcement/

- Vercel for hosting, because they take a Git repo and host it for you in a couple clicks and manage everything. Free or cheap ($20/mo) at MVP stage.

- Next.js (Vercel's open-source React framework) will handle frontend tooling, routing, type checking, and linting for you with a single command (`npx create-next-app`). Starting the server is one more command (`next dev`) and your page is up and running.

- For the UI layer, I'd recommend either starting with one of their prebuilt templates (https://vercel.com/templates/next.js) and modifying it as needed

OR using a modern component system like https://mui.com/ or https://ant.design/ or https://chakra-ui.com/ instead of trying to learn and write your own component and JS+CSS code. Using one of these systems will allow you to compose complex apps out of well-made, well-documented, easy-to-use primitives, making it much easier to focus on business needs rather than basic frontend components and infra.

The basic MUI system, for example, is totally free. You can find third-party apps built on top of it (https://mui.com/store/#populars) and pay a one-time license fee to essentially "fork" them, getting a prebuilt working app that you just attach your backend API calls to.

There are also low-code extensions of these frameworks (meaning you start with a GUI, plan out your app that way, but still have access to the source for future advanced changes). Examples are https://mui.com/toolpad/ and https://retool.com/use-case/dashboards-and-reporting

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Is this a lot? Yes and no. React has a learning curve of its own, but it can take the place of having to learn raw HTML and CSS. (Yes, you eventually should know those things for debugging and polishing, but they are largely a level of abstraction below what you really need for a basic MVP).

Once you learn React, its primary value isn't that it's a great language (opinions differ) but that it has a humongous ecosystem of third-party vendors, free open-source libraries (basically any component you might think to build is probably already available on npm), and a wide availability of devs from hobbyists to full-timers.

Others in this topic will suggest going away from Javascript as much as possible (and using things like HTMX or backend-to-HTML solutions like the old days). That's fine, but you lose out on the rich ecosystem of React and Javascript, so you end up having to build more yourself -- which is what you're trying to avoid in your case.

My own 2¢: As someone who grew up with HTML and made websites since the birth of Javascript and CSS, the web has always been messy. It's always been a semi-open ecosystem controlled by a few major companies (whether that's Netscape or Microsoft or Sun or Adobe, or these days Google and Apple), so it very much suffers from design-by-bullying. Whoever is the power player of the decade gets to add their favorite technologies that everyone else is forced to adopt. Thus the web became a hodgepodge of document markup systems poorly fitted for modern apps, with various hacks on top of hacks built to satisfy some big company or another's in-house needs. Sadly, that means going "vanilla HTML+JS" doesn't leave you with much, just the shattered legacy of poor historical decisions.

React at least helps by encouraging componentization and abstraction of UI elements to functions, using cleaner data models (actual variables and objects) vs direct DOM manipulation (storing page content as state).

We've gone through many generational shifts in approach, from the raw HTML days of Geocities to the you-build-it, we-host-it approach of Godaddy and its ilk, to the "all in one" CMSes like Wordpress or Drupal. These days, (if you want there to be), there can be a pretty clear separation between backend and frontend systems, and with that specialization came a bunch of startups (mentioned above) whose approach is "let us help you build it as best as we can, so you can focus on business logic instead of basic UI and infra". After 20 years of doing this, the current state of the web developer experience is actually my favorite so far. HTML and CSS suck for building apps (as opposed to documents), and although Javascript is a lot better since ECMAscript v6 (ES6), it is still inextricably tied to the DOM (and thus HTML elements) unless you use an abstraction like React.

It's the difference between writing something like:

```

We at MUI have been working on an open-source drag-and-drop React app builder. Link to the landing page: https://mui.com/toolpad/ This week we have published an interactive demo as well. You can check out the repo here.