So what’s up with Vulcan Next ?
Roughly 2 years ago, we started migrating Vulcan.js from Meteor, to Next.js.
Vulcan dates back from a time where JavaScript frameworks were not even a thing. You know, right after dinosaurs went extinct, but slightly before reusable satellite launchers. At that time, Vulcan was called Telescope and was built on top of Meteor.
It became “Vulcan” later on, when Apollo GraphQL was introduced in the framework.
Anyway, many reasons led us to believe that Next.js was now the right platform for a full-stack framework like Vulcan. Things got serious after we published in 2 introductory articles detailing our migration goals and choices.
Since then, a new wave of modern frameworks has emerged. You might have heard about Next.js-based frameworks such as Blitz.js and Bedrock, or competitors such as Redwood or Remix.
Most of them are built on the latest improvements brought by the Jamstack philosophy, and are focused on getting more performant web applications with a simpler code base.
So, what’s the position of Vulcan in this ecosystem?
A one-man, one-week framework
At Vulcan, we believe it should be possible for a single developer to create a full-fledged, modern SaaS application in less than a week.
Vulcan seeks either-side scalability.
Scale up as your project grows
It scales up thanks to its robust architecture and test tooling: Next.js as the backbone, TypeScript everywhere, Jest and Cypress, Storybook-based holistic testing, Markdown documentation out-of-the-box…
In this respect, Vulcan has every characteristics of a professional-grade framework.
Keep it simple enough for easy and fast adoption
But Vulcan also scales down. Scaling down means that Vulcan.js architecture is kept as streamlined as possible.
One example: database ORM are certainly great tools. But they are overwhelming when you are a solo developer using a single database. So instead, Vulcan connects directly to a Mongo database.
That’s a very opinionated choice! Yet it doesn’t meant that you are stuck with Mongo. Our simple CRUD connector system let’s you plug any kind of database or ORM, including SQL, Prisma, a Redis store…
We prefer a clear, simple approach to a complex, abstracted infrastructure that might hinder your learning process.
A good framework should make you faster AND smarter
We prefer less magic, and always favor the learning process. Modern JavaScript is difficult enough. Frameworks should make it simpler to learn.
Vulcan mixes the productivity-first philosophy of a framework like Meteor with the technological improvements brought by Next.js.
Get the best out of the Jamstack
More than a framework, Vulcan is a place to explore the future of front-end architectures. We want our applications to be performant, feature-rich, and pleasurable to develop.
Even before middlewares were introduced in Next.js 12, we designed an architecture that can statically render anything, including paid and private content.
If you have a blog with some premium, private content for paid subscribers, it means that this premium content is served with the same performance as free, public content. It doesn’t involve some complex gateway or a multi-server system, only Next.js!
Check this article to learn more.
Another innovation of Vulcan is its model-driven approach. You define a few JSON schemas that describe your data structures, and let Vulcan generate all these layers:
- A graphQL API with per-field and per-document permissions
- React hooks to consume data, with advanced filtering
- Forms
- A full-fledged admin area
So if your blogging application involves Authors, Posts, Subscriptions and Comments, you can get it up and running by defining only 4 JSON objects!
Join us as a beta-tester
Migrating all those features from Meteor to Next.js requires a massive amount of work. But we made good progress and Vulcan Next is finally ready for the beta-testing phase. If you want to create your own application, that’s the perfect time to give a shot to Vulcan Next!
What’s up for 2022?
- 2020 has been dedicated to discovery. We learnt how to use Next.js efficiently and how to translate Meteor concepts to Next.js
- 2021 has been dedicated to getting robust. We built a kick-ass Next.js starter and an NPM package library based on Lerna and TypeScript
- 2022 will be dedicated to being cool 😎 We will streamline the API, enhance the live learn tutorial, start making real apps with Vulcan, among other things
Learn Vulcan today!
Whether you are a student, a young developer or coming from another programming language, Vulcan might be your first professional JavaScript framework.
We strive to make your experience with the framework as smooth as possible, especially in the beginning.
That’s why we created Vulcan Learn, a live tutorial for Vulcan. It guides you step by step into installing and using Vulcan, with detailed explanations and code samples.
If it still feels a lot, we got you covered. You can join us on Slack and have a direct chat with Vulcan contributors.
See you soon at Vulcan!
Thanks for reading this article! If you liked it, please take a minute to discover our Next.js and GraphQL framework, VulcanNext.
