The tough things about working with Svelte and SvelteKit
- That as framework, Svelte is truly more intuitive than React and is a lot easier to get started with, but it can be deceptively more complex
- It is easier to get something going with SvelteKit, but once you require more complex features, you begin to enter unfamiliar territory where your basic knowledge is not enough.
- Once you began to need GraphQL, authentication, and more, you are faced with a choice: either go with popular solutions like Apollo and UQRL, or go with brand new Svelte-oriented stuff, such as Houdini or KitQL, where you cannot rely on the wealth of answers on StackOverflow and other places.
- With new revolutionary way of doing things comes the risk of the thing being so new, you may be the first one to encounter the problem, and you have to figure it out yourself. Even with common issues, SvelteKit just underwent a breaking update late last year (2022), so the answers you find on StackOverflow may not work anymore.
The great things about Svlete and SvelteKit
- You are starting with a new way of doing things, and therefore you are not bound by the conventions of the past. You would think that learning a new framework comes with the need to be familar with the one that came before (which I did with Next.js), but Svelte is just so intuitive that you just get the why and the how
- You are not actually not reinventing the wheel either; by doing away with boilerplate, you can start using a lot of existing libraries and tools are they are
- SvelteKit and Vite are fast, so previewing and troubleshooting is a breeze
Caveat
- Learning a particular framework can be similar to joining a tribe. You can get attached easily, and bias will enter your mind without your knowledge
- As someone who is still new to Web Development, and someone who picked up Web Dev with a practical goal in mind (to build my own app), this is still the best thing I can ask for
- The story of Svelte is an inspiring one. Watch the documentary on the origins of Svelte, and you find yourself rooting for it to succeed too: