Netlify Makes Preview Servers Available
Netlify has made a new primitive called preview servers available to everyone, with no additional cost for one active Preview Server. With Preview Servers, developer can make a change and see it rendered in seconds instead of minutes, the web hosting platform stated.
“While developers have used local servers with hot module reloading for years, what’s been missing is a cloud-hosted environment that brings this same real-time experience to entire teams,” the announcement stated. “This real-time preview capability opens up new possibilities across workflows that can benefit from instant visual feedback”
The post explains how Netlify itself deploys Preview Servers on its blog, which is published using Sanity CMS and Astro.
“Before Preview Servers, our content team would make changes in Sanity and wait for a build to complete before they could see how their blog post would look on our site,” Netlify stated. “It felt like our creative process was grinding to a halt with each build.”
Their engineering team set up a new preview branch with Preview Server, connecting it to their Sanity CMS with webhooks. This allows content creators to make changes in the CMS and immediately see how they’ll appear on the live site, with an animation to show how that looks in practice.
Survey Reveals What Causes Users To Ponder App Switch
Over two-thirds of mobile app users say it is very important that the apps they use look consistent and work flawlessly across different devices, according to a survey of over 1,000 US-based consumers for a report from Instabug.
The demand for uniformity of experience is why we’re seeing interest in emerging cross-platform frameworks like Avalonia and Lynx.
Unsurprisingly, more than four-fifths of consumers say that app performance and stability are very important.
More interestingly, the study indicates how this impacts adoption decisions. For example, 61% said they consider switching apps if they have to wait more than 5 seconds for the app to open or respond. Furthermore, 45% of usually stop using an app rather than contacting customer support to address an issue.
— By Lawrence Hecht, TNS analyst and writer
Nuxt Reworks Async Data Layer
Nuxt 3.17 released this week with a major reworking of the async data layer and a new built-in component.
The revamp to the open source, JavaScript framework’s data fetching layer “brings significant improvements to useAsyncData and useFetch,” wrote Daniel Roe, the Nuxt core team lead.
This release also introduces the component for SSR-safe time display, which resolves hydration mismatches when working with dates, Roe stated, adding that the component accepts multiple time formats and handles both client and server rendering.
In other Nuxt news, the framework now offers support for deploying Nuxt apps to Cloudflare Workers. Called NuxtHub, the option supports real-time experiences with zero configuration, according to the announcement.
Are MicroFrontends Worth the Switch?
If you’re wondering whether you should adopt a microfrontend, check out this research collaboration between consultancies McKinsey and RAVL.
The piece builds the case for microfrontends, noting that this approach can cut the time to build and deploy from days to minutes and improve frontend performance by speeding page load time by 40-75%. It can also help organizations use existing resources more efficiently and effectively.
But it also warns that some companies fail to attain these outcomes. The key is having a strategy and enacting governance, the post notes. It also discusses what that means.
Visa Makes Design System Public
Visa released its design system publicly recently, with support for React, Flutter, Angular and CSS.
For developers, the design system offers a unified framework that helps coders adhere to Visa’s brand and accessibility standards.
It can be used by developers to connect within Visa’s ecosystem of merchants and consumers.
“Instead of starting from scratch or reinventing the wheel, teams can build on smart, well-tested patterns that reflect modern thinking and the latest best practices,” Visa wrote in its announcement. “The public release of Visa’s design system will make it easier for our partners — and future partners, whether established fintechs, emerging startups, or banks — to build with the same standards, tools, and principles that drive Visa’s global products.”
Built for internal use in 2018, the design system was used to design and develop several products, including Visa’s Flexible Credential, Payment Passkey and Protect solutions.
The codebases are documented and continuously updated to support the React, Angular and Flutter development frameworks, Visa noted.
How Healthy Is Your Favorite Framework?
The home page for Is This Tech Dead.
React and Next are stable, Flutter is healthy, NativeScript is endangered and somehow Angular is both stable (version 2) and endangered (Angular.js), according to a new website called Is This Tech Dead.
This fun website evaluates technology by calculating a Deaditude Score that’s based on GitHub activity, Google jobs (or lack thereof), Reddit complaints, StackShare adoption, YouTube “desperation,” Hacker News “contempt” and Stack Overflow “panic.”
Developers can submit projects or pay their last respects to technology, although we somehow managed to “break” it and were told its Vercel server would have to cool down.
It’s built with Next.js, React, TypeScript, Tailwind and Supabase, with a footnote stating, “The irony is not lost on us that we’re tracking dying tech while using some of these.”
It’s the creation of Flutter’s Youssef El Behi. There’s a link to GitHub for the project, but it triggers a message:
“Look, I appreciate your enthusiasm for digital dumpster diving, but my sketchy web crawlers and data scrapers aren’t ready for the public spotlight yet. Let’s be real — they’re held together with duct tape, wishful thinking, and approximately 17 Stack Overflow answers and 6 AI prompts. Some of them might actually be illegal in several jurisdictions.”
The code will go public when it’s in “decent enough shape” or “when I’ve fully embraced my role as a chaos agent in the programming ecosystem,” El Behi added.
Happy Anniversary to Solid.js
It’s been a decade since Ryan Carniato created Solid.js and seven years since he released it into the wilds of open source.
Solid.js creator Ryan Carniato.
Recently, he reflected on the past 10 years, including the creation of the platform (obviously), as well as the bad vibes he got from other developers for launching another JavaScript framework.
With Solid.js, he was trying to tear down boundaries, which annoyed some people, he wrote.
“It wasn’t with the React folks that I felt the hostility from as much as the smaller libraries,” he stated. “They contended that what they could do wasn’t possible with JSX and there was a clear decision you needed to make between DX experiences.”
He also addressed concerns on Hacker News that he might drop the project, noting, “It is almost funny to read comments on Hacker News (they never change) that at this point worry about me deciding to drop the project.”
