Ryan CarniatoA lot of exciting things have been going in the Solid in the last few months since the 1.0 release.
Let's start with some big news.
Netlify joins up as an Official Deployment Partner
We are super excited to announce that Netlify has come on board as a Deployment partner and sponsor for the project. They will be contributing $500 a month towards the development and growth of Solid.
We will be adding the Deploy with Netlify to our official starter templates to make it easier than ever to deploy Solid applications.
1.0 Release and Response
We've had an incredible response to the 1.0 release. It is great to see years of work come to fruition. See what some of the voices in the industry have been saying about Solid:
Wow, I didn't expect this—a React alternative that actually looks convincing to me.
Also, looks like vanilla-extract would be a perfect fit with this.
solidjs.com09:50 AM - 29 Jun 2021
Solid has the reactivity that React should have had, and the impressive performance benefits that come with it. This is going to be a framework well worth exploring.
(Also, XState example in the release! 💯) twitter.com/solid_js/statu…19:19 PM - 28 Jun 2021SolidJS @solid_js🚀 We are so happy to announce Solid is 1.0!! 🎉 @RyanCarniato #DEVCommunity #solidjs #javascript #webdev https://t.co/CkK9UoWZOJ
Michel Weststrate@mweststrate
Not a revolution, but really solid (pun) evolution; clean component model, really efficient run-time model, deeply embedded reactivity. Definitely think it's worth giving it a shot in fresh new, limited scope projects! twitter.com/solid_js/statu…19:47 PM - 28 Jun 2021SolidJS @solid_js🚀 We are so happy to announce Solid is 1.0!! 🎉 @RyanCarniato #DEVCommunity #solidjs #javascript #webdev https://t.co/CkK9UoWZOJ
Dominic Gannaway@trueadmAfter reading through the source of SolidJS and understanding some of the design constraints, I'm really excited about its future. You can see lots of inspiration taken from other libraries, and lots of innovation too.
I recommend checking it out too: github.com/solidjs/solid21:25 PM - 10 Jul 2021
I'm not sure I fully appreciated how fast @solid_js is until I checked out this benchmark. Awesome job @RyanCarniato and team.
krausest.github.io/js-framework-b…
raw javascript > solid >>>>>> svelte > preact & vue >>>>>> react23:33 PM - 09 Aug 2021
Expanding the Team
I started this project and ran it on my own for many years but it had definitely grown beyond me. We've been expanding the team. Since I've never formally introduced the rest of the team I will take the opportunity now:
David Di Biase - Web Site/Community Manager
Alexandre Mouton Brady - Templates/Integrations
Milo M. - Tooling
Ryan Turnquist - Router/Libraries
Dan Jutan - Documentation/Training
There are also a small group of contributors making some great adds to Solid's ecosystem. You can see bios here.
Growing Ecosystem
Every day it seems like new libraries are coming out that showcase what you can do with Solid. So I thought I'd highlight a few of them.
Solid Primitives - Our "React Use". A set of high-quality reusable primitives.
Solid Flip - A new animation library that makes it easier than ever to do flip animations.
Solid DND - Drag and drop port of dnd-kit made to leverage Solid's fine-grained reactivity.
@felte/solid - A port of the Felte form library for Svelte available in Solid.
Solid URQL - A URQL wrapper to make using GraphQL in Solid easier than ever.
While not complete, there are several Component libraries currently being worked on:
Solid Headless
Solid Blocks
And recently with the question of DSL a few projects have been attempting to bring Svelte-like syntax into Solid:
Babel Plugin Solid Labels
Babel Plugin Undestructure
Interested in seeing more. Check out the Resources section of the website or the community-driven Awesome Solid.
Translations
We could have never anticipated the interest in translations right out the gate but so much great work being done by contributors. We now have documentation on solidjs.com available in 10 languages.
The full tutorials are being translated as well and are currently available in English, Japanese, and Chinese.
Thanks so much to:
Gaving Cong 🇨🇳
Jun Shindo 🇯🇵
David Di Biase 🇮🇹
Candido Sales Gomez 🇧🇷
Steven Yung 🇫🇷
Mehdi (MidouWebDev) 🇫🇷
Athif Humam 🇮🇩
Alex Lohr 🇩🇪
Pheianox 🇷🇺
Content Explosion
In a similar vein, the amount of new Solid content that has been pouring in has been amazing. Honestly, there is so much between featured on Fireship, to the many independent streams and interviews/podcasts I participated in. But here's a couple that really stood out:
Articles
Introduction to the Solid JavaScript Library by Charlie Gerard - CSS-Tricks
One of the best introductions we've seen written to date. A really good overview of all the core features.
SolidJS said stiffly: I am more react than React by Kasong - Segment Fault
Despite the translation, you can get the humor of this article which provides some great examples to illustrate Solid's approach.
Podcasts
SolidJS with Ryan Carniato - PodRocket
We talk about a lot more than just Solid but trends in frontend in general.
React vs Svelte vs Solid & MicroFrontends | Ryan Carniato - Nikos Show
This podcast talks about developments in compilers and in server-side rendering in JavaScript Frameworks.
Videos
And if you haven't seen it yet check out my talk at React Finland which is a great introduction to SolidJS for those coming from a React background.
I've also started streaming on my Youtube channel. So if you are interested in the inner workings of the framework could be worth checking out.
Current Development
New things are coming down the pipeline for Solid in the coming months. Mostly we want to make it easier for people to approach using Solid. For that reason, there are 3 things we are working on that we feel will aid in that process a lot.
Documentation
While my tireless nights writing those over a couple months in the spring got us here, we can do better. Dan Jutan has been doing a great job focusing on the language to make the tutorials more accessible to developers with all levels of familiarity. We are also working on more beginner-focused, long-form tutorials to help onboarding people newer to web development.
Server Side Rendering
Consolidating and generalizing on use cases to make it easier to use Solid in a variety of projects. This will include better documentation and rounding out a lot of the rough edges. The flagship experience for Single Page App SSR will be present through our new Solid Start project which is an official minimal Meta-Framework built on top of Vite with support of deploying to various platforms. But this work will also include better support for integration with Astro for those interested in Multi-Page Apps. So no matter what type of web application you are building we have you covered.
Reactive Performance
Finally, I'm personally doing a rework and optimization of our core reactive system. The last time I gave it a good tune was back in February 2020. We've added a lot of features since then and it's time to streamline out the edge cases and improve performance. This is especially important as we look to support custom renderers, for things like WebGL or native.
And that's it for now. We're going to be doing these updates more often in the future. So much incredible stuff has been going on and I can only imagine what more we will have to share next time.
