Explore Blitz.js developments

One of our most successful blog posts in 2022 was Blitz.js: A new full stack React framework on the horizon, written by Dragan Jakovljevic. We published it on our website one year ago today, so we decided to ask Dragan about his impressions and opinion about Blitz.js now that the year has passed.

Here’s what he said:

“Wow, what a year it was for Blitz.js! All kinds of things happened with it in 2022 to the extent that Blitz is no longer a framework! Yep, you read that right.

As you can see in my previous article, Blitz.js was built on top of Next.js. It felt like the right decision, and many people were really impressed with Blitz, but at the end of the day, 99% of users went back to Next.js to build their production apps. The reality was that Blitz would always play second fiddle to Next.js. The growth completely stagnated, with Blitz not gaining its expected popularity. Therefore, Brandon Bayer and the community decided to completely change the Blitz direction to bring it to a larger number of people.

At the beginning of 2022, it was decided to pivot Blitz to a framework-agnostic toolkit that preserves the world-class DX (developer experience) and features we adore but to bring it to all Next.js users and optionally Remix, SvelteKit, Nuxt, etc., making it a toolkit for building anything with a database, from side projects to massive enterprise apps; a toolkit that both enhances full stack DX and provides the missing backend components for JS that Rails and Laravel enjoy.

After all, what makes Blitz amazing is the Zero-API data layer, cookie-based authentication, recipes, and code scaffolding. All those things are not strictly related to Next.js. So, why not decouple Blitz from any specific framework and make it easier for millions more developers to benefit from it and reduce framework fatigue in the ecosystem?

In May 2022, Blitz 2.0 Alpha was announced, and a few months later, Blitz 2.0 Beta was launched, bringing some new shiny things! Blitz 2.0 is now a modular toolkit that plugs into any new or existing Next.js app. It picks up where Next.js leaves off, providing battle-tested libraries and conventions for shipping and scaling worldwide apps. It adds all the missing features and functionality that enables you to build a full-stack Next.js app.

Conventions & Codegen — set up an entire app in 2 mins

Blitz Auth — battle-tested and more flexible than next-auth, with easy third-party social integrations like Google, GitHub, and Auth0

Blitz RPC — typesafe data layer, much easier than REST/GraphQL

Going forward, Blitz’s mission is to be the most trusted technical resource for rapidly building and scaling full-stack TypeScript apps. The stable version is just around the corner.”

We can say that Blitz is becoming increasingly popular, and thanks to Dragan, we now know in which direction Blitz is developing. Let’s exchange opinions! Feel free to write your thoughts about Blitz.js in the comments below.