An Update on Fresh

I think there’s a universe in which Deno took off but it’s clearly not ours. I’m inclined to believe this is because what Deno is trying for, a more mature standards based and security focused version of the JavaScript ecosystem, isn’t what people use JavaScript for. Makes me sad because I really appreciate what they are trying to do.

Haven&#x27;t really been using Fresh; I feel like whenever I get into the blending of client&#x2F;server with these ecosystems, things get real muddy real fast. Mostly been doing either sites (mostly fully ssr with Hono + very light vanilla), or fully client-rendered web pwas (solid or mithril).<p>Deno itself, though, is still a very comfy js environment. I pretty much use it for all js&#x2F;ts that doesn&#x27;t run in the browser (I also use it for build steps of said browser code). It just kinda has everything I need&#x2F;want, so I don&#x27;t have to add too many dependencies, and don&#x27;t have to muck around in build&#x2F;env stuff. Just feels kinda easy.

I am not sure, deno seems really bleak as I had read the HN post about deno actively shrinking its datacenters and fresh activity.<p>This seems an attempt to show to the world that its not that, but I would say that it&#x27;s still not working.<p>Deno deploy, their product is better on supabase or even bunny cdn which provides more locations than deno itself.<p>Bun also exists. And did we forget about node itself?<p>Cloudflare workers is a beast if we can work with non standards&#x2F; I personally feel a little bit that some code meant for node won&#x27;t work on cf as much as it would on deno

A bit of Deno trivia: it runs the big &quot;Chicago Brick&quot; video wall in Google&#x27;s main office in Fulton Market; they open-source the code here:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;google&#x2F;chicago-brick">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;google&#x2F;chicago-brick</a><p>(I contributed a little &quot;Penrose-tile&quot; module during my time there, though I never got it in production :P)

Super excited about Fresh 2.0<p>I believe that Fresh is pretty ideal for AI-paired web development since so much information about the application structure is easily parsable just by iterating through the file system (routes are folders and files). I have been using Claude Desktop MCP server with Fresh 1.0 and Claude can &quot;read&quot; the application pretty well.

Fresh is awesome. I have a couple of commercial products running it right now and I find it very fast to develop with.<p>It powers my friend&#x27;s canadian roasted coffee business website, available here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;torque.cafe&#x2F;en&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;torque.cafe&#x2F;en&#x2F;</a>

I’ve been checking every couple weeks for a status update on Fresh for the last six months (others have been checking longer, it’s a vocal set of early adopters on GH and discord!).<p>I’m not even sure I’d have confidence in adopting Fresh, but I definitely was using it as a canary for the Deno org’s health. If they can’t maintain their flagship front end framework, after all, they must be circling the drain?<p>If that’s not the situation, I’m bewildered by their approach to communication.<p>Anyway, I’m still left wondering if Deno will be around in 18mo. It’s <i>generally</i> a nice DX, but so risky to bet on. I want them to succeed, but fear they won’t.

Happy to answer any questions :)

Using Fresh (v1) for a commercial project, mostly SSR with a very few islands. So far it has been great for my productivity and it’s reasonably fast for our purposes (we run it on a VPS, not Deno Deploy)

On a meta level: after decades of VC-speak overuse on the internet any headline that says &quot;An update on Thing&quot; reads as &quot;We are shutting Thing down&quot;. So, people who decide not to read this article may simply assume that this is another piece of bad news about Deno.<p>It is not: the post talks about the development progress of their web framework, which seems to be their take on server-rendered pages with islands of interactivity. Kinda like Astro or maybe like Remix.

The Fresh home page has a routing bug on it (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fresh.deno.dev" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fresh.deno.dev</a>)<p>Scroll down to &quot;Stream HTML straight from the server&quot; -&gt; Click &quot;Lemonade&quot; recipe link -&gt; Click &quot;Learn more about Partials&quot; Button -&gt; Press back button -&gt; Press back button again -&gt; Press forward button = The raw Lemonade recipe HTML partial gets rendered instead of the full page.<p>Or just go here straight from this link: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fresh.deno.dev&#x2F;recipes&#x2F;lemonade" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fresh.deno.dev&#x2F;recipes&#x2F;lemonade</a><p>Maybe they should add some logic to prevent being able to load partials as their own page.

A Fresh update

Please do not title your posts &quot;An Update On X&quot; if you aren&#x27;t shutting it down. You can blame the SV startups for the connotation but that&#x27;s where we&#x27;re at now. But in this case, I guess it has worked as a form of clickbait :)