Hilla promotes React more than Lit recently?

Hilla
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Seem Hilla website recently is promoting Hilla with React more than with Lit. This could be main stream of Hilla in future ?

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Long story short: Yes, Hilla is promoting React as default

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If you don’t mind. Could you share the main reasons ?

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@marcushellberg can probably answer that better :smile:

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Just my two cents: There are much more developers familiar with React than with Lit, makes a lot of sense to target them.

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The long story is that we want to keep iterating the Hilla development experience until we realize the full potential that we see in it. This means that we choose to focus on a single tech stack to avoid slowing down the iteration. Either Lit or React would be appropriate rendering solutions in that tech stack and we have chosen to focus on React since that’s what’s used by most of the potential users that we talk with.

We hope to eventually extend our reach to other technologies once we are really happy with how things work for the single stack that we are now focusing on. This applies both to frontend rendering solutions such as Lit, Vue or Angular as well as backend technologies such as Quarkus or Kotlin.

We remain committed to using Lit as our technology of choice for building reusable UI components for the web. We also keep the existing Lit support in Hilla working at the same level that it is on today. Some of the new features that we build are independent from the rendering library and will thus also be useful for those who use Hilla with Lit. Other things that we build are fundamentally based on React APIs and will thus only be useful for React users.

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Thank you, @Leif, for this interesting and transparent insights in Vaadin’s product development process/roadmap!

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If you are a long-term Vaadin user, you have already seen that frontend technologies have changed. So far, our journey has been something like this:

  • HTML
  • JavaScript
  • Google Web Toolkit
  • Polymer
  • Lit
  • React

The difference between Vaadin Flow and Hilla is that Hilla you can use a particular frontend framework, but Vaadin Flow hides it behind the Java API (yes, you can use React with Vaadin Flow)

Whenever you create new (client-side) widgets for Hilla or Flow, you must choose a frontend technology. Unless you are specifically a React developer, I recommend creating custom elements for maximum portability.

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Lit was born in 2018 after React in 2013.
Lit is closer to web standards (web component, TypeScript…) than React. So technology should be not a concern for the Lit.

Agree with @ollit.1 Seem the main reason is due to the popular of React over Lit.
So, it makes sense to choose React which could help Hilla more popular in community.

It is great if Hilla can support both React and Lit in long term.
And it is really bad for users choosing Lit and then in one day Hilla says no longer support Lit :joy:

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My two cents: If you are a React developer or really want to learn React, go for it. If you are a Java developer, go with Lit. It’s so much easier to learn.
I have a customer who built his new webshop product on Hilla with Lit, and the developers were pure Java developers who were up to speed in a few hours.

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