ZULU Posts
I have been waiting for the React Router plugin for Rsbuild for month or so. It's been released, but it still isn't fully functional. Digging through the code, I feel like Zulu may be my best bet, for both my personal projects and ATF. Zulu compiles in less than 0.2 seconds, both in development and production builds, with a minimal React app. The same app running React Router 7 + Vite is over 3 seconds to build and the dev environment is something like 45 seconds, due to the way Vite's dev server works.
Zulu uses Rsbuild with React Router 7 as a library and a tiny Zulu core to replace some of the framework functions. It still reuses quite a bit of React Router 7 framework. It also uses the Node.js HTTP server, which is faster than Express, and exposes everything you need to build upon, so less smoke and mirrors. Allora isn't as far along as Grazie, so I'm doing testing on Allora and if all goes well, then I'll implement Zulu in Grazie 0.8. The priority right now is just to verify Zulu's capabilites in Allora and then replace Remix in ATF with Zulu, if it's capable. All signs currently seem positive and I'm liking the outlook so far.
Zulu itself, I don't plan to do a lot with. I'd rather leave it as a simple and functional framework, which can be built upon. The extensibility for Grazie and Allora can be built on top of that. I don't regret the Grazie 0.7 changes, as they are a step in the right direction, but I'm still not happy with Vite and Remix/React Router 7 choosing that path makes me want to do something better.
Zulu is a server-side rendered framework for React. What makes Zulu different from other frameworks is it uses Rsbuild for its build tool/support libraries, Biome for linting and formatting, and the React Router 7 framework for routing, and it doesn't use Vite. Initially it will use Mantine for UI, for my own purposes, but I plan to provide templates, or at least a barebones version, people to choose their UI.
I personally feel this combination of tools provides a lot of functionality, so Zulu itself is actually very small, as it relies mostly on its core dependencies. It also provides a fairly straight forward migration from Remix 2 and React Router 7 framework. This is by design, as I use Remix for my personal and professional projects. The main difference between Zulu and React Router 7 framework is it doesn't use Vite and it uses a custom server built on node:http. I plan to experiment with other server options, but so far node:http has been more than adequate.
The real powerhouse behind Zulu is Rsbuild, which is blazing fast, and just very good all around. I really don't understand why more projects aren't using Rsbuild. In fact, Rsbuild was the initial step that got me to build Zulu in the first place. It's just not being used that much and it's almost silly how fast and flexible it is. A friend of mine, who generally uses SPAs, seemed quite impressed with the build speeds we are seeing in Zulu.
You can already fine Zulu in my public github repositories, if you want to take a peek. It's very much experimental and will probably be unstable until I can build up some decently sized test cases. I'm currently using it to replace React Router 7 framework (Vite) in the dev branch of Grazie!.