Build a hit counter for Gatsby with React, AWS Lambda, and FaunaDB

I may be missing something here, but... all that for a hit counter? Even using React for the front-end seems overkill for a little widget.

Hey folks! Author here. Just a quick clarification, this is NOT a sponsored post by Fauna, as some have claimed. As the article states, the choice for database is somewhat arbitrary, you can swap it out for Mongo or whatever else you’d like and not much code would need to change.

I suspect this is intended to be just an example tutorial that isn&#x27;t intended to be &quot;this is how a hit counter SHOULD BE&quot;.<p>Queue the OMG modern web complaints that are correct that this is a lot for a hit counter, but this also I don&#x27;t think that&#x27;s the point here.<p>If someone were to take this article and think &quot;oh this is how to build a web counter&quot; that&#x27;s not OMG modern web, that&#x27;s a different problem.

I can&#x27;t help but feel like this article is a good summary of what&#x27;s wrong with the modern internet. It&#x27;s not a bad article, it just feels like a parody.<p>&#x27;Ok guys, now here&#x27;s the modern way to make one of the more simple things from yesteryear.<p>First, lets bust out react....<p>A few hundred loc later...<p>Ok guys the database...<p>Sign up for account<p>Several more hundred loc later...<p>&#x27;Now to actually write our functions&#x27;<p>Download some dependencies Several hundred loc later...<p>And...here&#x27;s your hit counter guys...<p>This whole article just captures perfectly the essence of all the things we complain about with the modern web.<p>Overengineered, convoluted solutions to simple problems.<p>Honestly, it would be nice sometimes if modern solutions remembered sometimes, it&#x27;s ok to just keep it simple.<p>I did have a quick look around to see if i could find a simple, &#x27;modern&#x27; hit counter.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.codementor.io&#x2F;@jamesezechukwu&#x2F;how-to-create-a-simple-counter-using-javascript-html-css-bxcjgbbxa" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.codementor.io&#x2F;@jamesezechukwu&#x2F;how-to-create-a-si...</a><p>Personally, I prefer the simplicity of this to the article myself.

I don&#x27;t think this is at all in the spirit of hit counters of the past; IIRC they were an img tag that would be dynamically rendered serverside. Static markup » dynamic content.<p>Perhaps a more apples-to-apples comparison would be an img tag that returns an SVG, allowing CSS styling. You can still choose serverless backend, or you can use the tried-and-true apache&#x2F;nginx with memcache, just like the 90s.

Taking a step back, it’s truly insane that it is standard practice to apply this level of complexity to the storage, incrementing, and rendering of a <i></i>single integer<i></i>. The number of dependencies involved is surely enormous. Perhaps I am underestimating the complexity of the task at hand, but how is this not like a 2 line flask app or something comparable.

&gt; q.Update(document.ref, { data: { hits: document.data.hits + 1, ...<p>Does FaunaDB have an &quot;atomic increment&quot; a la Firestore? Knowing nothing about FaunaDB, I suspect this code in the blog post has the potential to &quot;lose&quot; hits that come in at roughly the same time...

Pretty funny that the push towards static serverless has made something you used to get essentially for free on your dynamic client-server app into quite a complex undertaking.<p>Static compile-time sites are fantastic for a huge swath of applications, but this is a good reminder that you can shift the work around and even come up with better isolated, decoupled approaches but somewhere it still has to get done. Introducing functionality that is dynamic outside the browser and requires state (i.e. persistence) is definitely an area that seems to &quot;fight&quot; the natural inclinations of frameworks like Gatsby et al.

Now compare this with Elixir + a good old database: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dashbit.co&#x2F;blog&#x2F;homemade-analytics-with-ecto-and-elixir" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dashbit.co&#x2F;blog&#x2F;homemade-analytics-with-ecto-and-eli...</a>

I&#x27;d just like to say that this is one of the most beautiful websites I&#x27;ve ever seen!

Wouldn&#x27;t it be easier to access Google Analytics using API and pull data from there?

Paid article of Fauna.