July - August 2023 iteration plan

[marvinhagemeister]

A new Fresh version is cut on a monthly basis around the middle of the month and this post intends to capture the main tasks we want to focus on. It replaces #563 as that has gotten hard to keep track of. A monthly plan matches the release cycle and allows for more flexibility by making it easier to account for shifts in priorities.

The current list of tickets included in this release can always be found in the related GitHub milestone: https://github.com/denoland/fresh/milestone/3

Plan items

The current plan of main features planned for this cycle:

• Layouts - Route layout #1506
• Route Groups - Route grouping support #1150
• twind v1 remaining issues - Performance hit after twind v1 migration #1116
• Prebuilt islands - Pre-build islands #1062
• Allow feature based folders instead of separating by tech (island/routes/etc) - Allow putting islands + routes + components in the same folder #1486

Moved to next cycle:

• Preact Actions - to be announced
• Simplify Fresh server setup (run in one file) - Simplify Fresh Server #1487, idea: entire projects as plugins #1602

Note that this list is not set in stone. Random ideas occur spontaneously and the async route components in last release for example were only added later in the cycle based on an evening exploration I did.

Engineering

• Solve the flaky windows CI - Make windows CI tests more reliable #1476

[lino-levan]

Allow feature based folders instead of separating by tech (island/routes/etc)

Going to open a discussion here before creating an issue with a description of what needs to be done. I see a few approaches to this which could be fine:

1. Introduce a new directory in which we do app-directory-next-style routing
2. Use the same directory, and have islands be named something.island.tsx and components be named something.component.tsx (or another pattern)

What would your preference be?

[Norfeldt]

twind v1 remaining issues - #1116

Would like to bring attention to an elephant in the room 🐘.

Twind is like tailwind a great tool - however using it without the right tooling makes it painful and difficult to learn. The vscode-twind-intellisense is only maintained by 2 contributors, last commit was 2 years ago and it has been broken since typescript 5 was the default in vscode.

[marvinhagemeister]

@Norfeldt That's a very good point and something that concerns me as well. On top of that I feel like moving to a non-runtime solution would fit better into the Fresh philosophy too.

[Norfeldt]

@Norfeldt That's a very good point and something that concerns me as well. On top of that I feel like moving to a non-runtime solution would fit better into the Fresh philosophy too.

And tailwind can't be used? Or is there a problem with it?

[lino-levan]

Sorry, to clarify, are you talking about Tailwind the specification, or Tailwind the PostCSS plugin, or perhaps something else? With unocss (which is what I believe we're thinking about adding / moving to), we should have all of the Tailwind classes as with our current solution.

[marvinhagemeister]

@Norfeldt I'm all for using tailwind directly.

[wtchen]

@Norfeldt I'm all for using tailwind directly.

On a related note, does Fresh support using stylesheets directly at the moment?

[lino-levan]

Yes. You can put them in your static folder and simply reference them using standard html link tags

[marvinhagemeister]

FYI I've moved the app.use() idea to simplify the Fresh server setup to the next cycle. There is ongoing discussion in #1602 what the API shape should look like. I don't want to rush that just to get something in the current release and thereby create API churn once the proper API lands. It needs more time to cook, so moving that to next cycle.

[marvinhagemeister]

This cycle is completed. Closing this issue in favour of the new one for the next cycle: #1618