November 13, 2020 • 2 min read
I was recently on the CodeSandbox site and one of the templates I saw was for something called Blitz.js. It was the first time I heard of it, and was instantly intrigued. I decided to look into it by checking out the website and video walkthrough on the motivation for building it. The biggest takeaway for me was how easy Blitz is making Fullstack Development with React. It is making sure developers spend less time setting up and configuring, and more time developing their core product.
I wanted to share how cool this framework is, so I put together this post so that if you are looking to build a new Web App, you have knowledge of something that can help you easily get started.
Blitz is a framework for building Fullstack React applications. This means it has support for developing your frontend, backend, and managing your databases.
Blitz is built on top of Next.js, a framework for building static and server rendered React applications. This means that Blitz has support for features of Next.js such as static page generation and file system based routing.
Another cool feature is being able to plugin and use any database you want. It comes with the Prisma 2 database client by default. You can connect a database client like Prisma 2 to your favorite database and easily have access to your data all through JavaScript. If you don't always want to write queries to access or update your data, you can use the awesome DB Viewer that comes built in and manage your data from there 😉. If you prefer to use the command line, Blitz also has support for you to view and access your data through a console session.
When it comes to building new projects, one of the pain points is setting up your configurations and commands for linting, typescript, prettier, testing and this and that and this...the list just seems to be growing🤯. Luckily, a lot of this is set up for you when starting your Blitz app. Some things that are preconfigured include Prettier, TypeScript, Github Repo, Eslint, and offline support.
Blitz also comes with a built in Authentication framework, allowing you to add user accounts and support for logging in and signing up your users. It also has social log in support so your users can easily authenticate with a social app.
Overall I thing Blitz has a lot going for it. React is super popular, web development is getting bigger and better by the day, the community around Blitz is growing quickly, and there are very few frameworks doing what Blitz is doing. By the looks of it, Fullstack web development with React is about to get supercharged. Developers will focus less on configurations and setting up, and more time on actually building their product.
At the time of this post, Blitz is still in Alpha stage. There are a good amount of other features in the works including plugins, recipes, React Native support, built in testing, and more. Check out the Blitz site or watch their introduction video to get started. I'm excited for the future of Blitz and hope you are too!