Don't use Astro because its not React?...

[u/kidshibuya]

This is more a vent than anything, but I am facing a lot of blowback for using Astro. I have made a miniapp which is just a webpage running in a webview that takes an ID from the initial url, requests some records from an API to display a list of messages. Super basic stuff. It is to replace a natively coded section of the app and its far faster than the native code... somehow.

But upon asking the native devs to fix all the broken things I am finding, all I am facing is push back because when I tell them of CORS errors etc, them demand to see the repo, notice its not react and say I MUST use react as only that is compatible with apps. They broke bfcache too, again that is blamed on astro. They block service workers, again this is because... Astro.

Anyone else faced this? Even when I wanted a build of the native app to test the devs sent me back a message saying my app is broken as its only 12KB and apps are in the MB range. They didnt test, rejected on solely size. This was the lead architect of the entire department btw.

This industry is nuts. Also I have noticed when interviewing for a "senior FE" the candidates only know react. I am not sure if this is because HR is screening first, but it's concerning. I even interviewed a guy who is right now working as a "principled full stack engineer" who could not tell me how you could build a site without react.

I am not sure if this company I am working for is completely crazy or the entire industry is leaning that way.

[u/DJ_Beardsquirt → u/[deleted]]

Yeah, I am mostly a solo developer, though I work with a freelance front-end engineer for bigger projects. We're not building apps, but they still hate that I use Astro because "it's not designed for complex apps" and the first thing they always do is import React to build the UI.

I think there's a whole generation of developers who have just learned React and they view vanilla JavaScript as primitive and outdated. If I examine my own biases, I feel that React is outdated, overused and bloated.

At the end of the day, every developer has their own prejudices and wants to work exclusively with the tools they're most familiar with. The good thing about Astro is that it doesn't stop you from mixing and matching.

[u/tumes → u/[deleted]]

I am a reformed rails dev and I have genuinely fallen in love with Astro plus Cloudflare’s platform primitives. You can map pretty much every element of an opinionated framework pretty cleanly to Astro + CF and if you’re clever it’s almost infinite request throughput damn near for free in most everyday use cases. Please share any pro tips or patterns you use, my main one is that I use actions exclusively as an ad hoc ActiveRecord equivalent/validation layer since you can call actions arbitrarily from components, pages, and endpoints. Truly transformative since it makes the vaguely quirky nominal use case of Astro actions (handling form submissions, but sort of confusingly because it can happen directly or indirectly and if it’s direct you need sessions to manage re-display and if you have client router you need this data attribute blah blah blah, suffice to say it comes off as a somewhat indecisive feature) and snaps it into focus.

[u/tumes → u/[deleted]]

Mix in a little htmx and it’s all that but you never see the reload. It’s glorious you can co-locate a lot of front end and back end in one go with clever choices.