Frontend First

Tom Preston-Werner on Architecture Decisions in Redwood JS

Episode Notes

Tom Preston-Werner joins Sam and Ryan to talk about some of the architecture decisions behind Redwood JS, a recently released full-stack JS framework he's been working on for more than a year. Tom talks about how Redwood's Services provide a first-class layer of abstraction on top of your backend data models for your application's business logic, why Redwood went all-in on GraphQL, and how the framework is poised to take advantage of future improvements coming to serverless infrastructure.

 

Topics include:

- 0:00 – Rails' influence on Redwood

- 8:00 – How Redwood Services keep your backend code organized

- 12:04 – The decisions driven by the desire to write React on the frontend

- 22:57 – Deep dive into Redwood Services

- 30:58 – Why Redwood uses GraphQL

- 44:37 – Caches & invalidation

- 55:52 – Why Cells are more than Hooks

- 1:07:02 – How databases can make their way into the JAMStack

 

Links:

- [Redwood JS](https://redwoodjs.com/)

- [Tom on Twitter](https://twitter.com/mojombo)