Introducing RealWorld đ
đ Exemplary fullstack blog apps powered by React, Angular, Node, Django, and many more â itâs like TodoMVC, but for fullstack apps! https://github.com/gothinkster/realworld
TL;DR â RealWorld shows you how the exact same real world blogging platform is built using React/Angular/& more on top of Node/Django/& more. Yes, you can mix and match them, because they all adhere to the same API spec đźđ
So about a year ago, I had this realization about a problem I had:
Mastering the core concepts & ideology of a new framework is unnecessarily frustrating.
You read the docs, run a contrived example in a codepen, rip apart the âtodoâ example app & put it back together again, get their CLI installed locally⊠and then youâre off to the races!
Except youâre not. Not even close. Because when you start actually trying to build out your 0wn app, thatâs when Murphyâs law hits you.
âHow do I preload data before navigating to a certain route? That definitely wasnât in any of the docs or examples. And why is this CLI telling me that left-pad canât be resolved? I canât even get a Hello World app running right now. This is infuriating.â
It will take weeks or even months of this mental anguish to attain ample understanding and mastery of this new framework. Worse yet, the Javascript ecosystem ainât slowinâ down. So once youâre done mastering this one, thereâs gonna be more out there that you gotta masterâand youâll never have enough time for them all.
If you step back, this is a rare problem in the history of software engineering that weâre experiencing. Most of the improvements in softwareâs history have been guided by centralized top-to-bottom efforts from governments, corporations, and the like. That is, until the web came around. The key difference with the web is that its upgrade model follows a more decentralized & democratic solution, and thus the direction of innovation flows opposite: bottom-to-up.
So whenever you see a new library or framework released, whatâs really going on is just the Javascript ecosystem doing what it was designed to do: enable anyone to make improvements on top of the webâs runtimeâsome of which even make it back into the core runtime itself.
This is a good thing.
However, itâs a widely discussed problem that whatâs going on is fatiguingânot because the rate of innovation itself is fatiguing, but because our traditional human learning methods arenât scaling well enough to match it.
In other words, we canât change the pace of innovation on the web. But we can change how fast we are able to communicate those changes to each other.
Iâve always loved how TodoMVC did this. By creating the same application (whose intended functionality needed no explaining) in every framework, they created the Rosetta Stone for Javascript UI libraries and frameworks.
However, despite the fact that most todo apps/tutorials provide an excellent cursory glance at a frameworkâs capabilities, they typically donât convey the knowledge & perspective required to actually build ârealâ web applications with it.
Why? Itâs because of the origins of todo applications themselves.
Todo apps are not good examples when youâre comparing ârealisticâ web applications because todo apps existed long before the web did. Phrased differently, todo apps have not been one of the breakthrough applications whose mere existence required the web itself. So naturally, oneâs first idea when imagining the simplest possible todo app probably doesnât have a hard requirement for being perma-connected to the web.
But another great model of this that Iâve always loved was the âcreate a blogâ tutorial in the Rails docs. Spoilers: they have you make a blog.
A blog. One of the most simple inventions that never would have existed without the web itself. And it takes full advantage of the web too: querying & persisting data to a database, an authentication system, session management, full CRUD for resourcesâand now these days social blogging platforms (like the site youâre reading this on) have also perfected relational features like following, liking, and commenting. A blogging site is the perfect example of a simple yet robust web application.
Reusing the best ideas from TodoMVC and the Rails blog tutorial, we took a stab at solving this problem by creating the design & API spec for a real world social blogging site similar to Medium.com. We named it Conduit. And then we started writing the first six framework implementations that it could be powered by: Angular 1.x, Angular 2+, or React&Redux on top of Node, Django, or Rails.
As of today, weâre excited to announce that all six stacks have been completed and you can check them out on the RealWorld github repo! (Be sure to star/fork too :) You can check out a live demo of Conduit thatâs powered by React&Redux on top a Node backend đź
Now that weâve proven that Conduit can work across multiple frameworks, weâre inviting you to share your mastery & add support for the other frameworks out there (Vue, Polymer, Elm, Go, Erlang, âŠ) by implementing Conduit in a new framework!
PS â Weâd love to hear any ideas/feedback you have in the comments (or on Twitter @ericsimons40)! đ»
