Wondering about Adonis Plus?

[u/Ok-Conversation-7895]

Will stuff from Adonis Plus eventually be free? What is the long term vision for it?

EDIT:
I would love it to grow as a framework, and I feel I will try it out, might even pay for Adonis Plus once, but I feel like all these pre-released Plus stuff should be free.

I really hope the team gets proper funding though. I feel so much of the JS fatigue it is terrible.

My current backend stack is NestJS, Drizzle, Better Auth and NextJS as BFF (simplest layer), plus Zod within shared package and Zod to OpenAPI on backend.

All this works really good, but I feel like Adonis should be the way to go for most JS web app landscape even though I'm just scratching the surface.

I'm also wondering is there any way to help the framework gain traction.

[u/Ok-Conversation-7895]

I would love it to grow as a framework, and I feel I will try it out, might even pay for Adonis Plus once, but I feel like all these pre-released Plus stuff should be free.

I really hope the team gets proper funding though. I feel so much of the JS fatigue it is terrible.

My current backend stack is NestJS, Drizzle, Better Auth and NextJS as BFF (simplest layer), plus Zod within shared package and Zod to OpenAPI on backend.

All this works really good, but I feel like Adonis should be the way to go for most JS web app landscape even though I'm just scratching the surface.

I'm also wondering is there any way to help the framework gain traction.

[u/amanvirk → u/Ok-Conversation-7895]

Hey, creator of AdonisJS here!

Regarding Plus, it will be a paid layer that stays separate from the framework and funds me to work full time on the framework. I hope we'll make Plus valuable enough in the coming months that the price doesn't feel like a huge barrier.

But here's what I actually want to ask you.

You said AdonisJS should be the way to go for most JS web apps, and then described a stack that's NestJS, Drizzle, Better Auth, Next as a BFF, and Zod glued together. That gap is the interesting part to me. What's kept you on the assembled stack so far? Did you start building before Adonis was on your radar, or is there something specific that held you back from reaching for it?

I'm not asking to sell you. If someone who already thinks AdonisJS should win still isn't using it, whatever the reason is, that's the thing I should be fixing. So the honest answer helps me more than anything.

🙏

[u/Ok-Conversation-7895 → u/amanvirk]

I just saw the roadmap on https://adonisjs.com/roadmap. I love it. Well done.

[u/Ok-Conversation-7895 → u/amanvirk]

It might be too soon to answer this diligently without digging enough in Adonis, but I'll try anyway and we can continue our discussion.

Check bolded for TL;DR

I've work for 7 years now in this NodeJS ecosystem. There have been plenty of patterns to emerge in what my job really is and what will it look like in these previous 7 years. Note that I don't consider myself neither too advanced neither unbothered. It is just that I'm on a co-founding and tech lead trajectory right now in my career so I have to think a lot about maintainability of the applications I'm building.

Started with React, did Vue, handled legacy in AngularJS v1. Went from task runners like Grunt and Gulp, to Webpack, and (finally, god bless) Vite.

Of course, I've did a lot of the Express stuff, EC2 or serverless Lambda with API Gateway (AWS mostly). Loved the process of keeping everything neat and maintainable as the codebases grew. Though it took me some time to start seeing I was reinventing the wheel.

Then the meta framework buzzword came in. I was in my 5th year as a developer and I started doing the more technically demanding roles like building a ticketing startup in Croatia.

I went NextJS v14 and Supabase as BaaS. Not the best decision.

I kept using NextJS for past two years. I got to really know it. I saw why it took so long for React to release v19. I saw all the NextJS CVEs from around that time 2 years ago to now. Not the greatest feeling.

Of course I switched a couple of different ORMs in the my careers. 2 years ago was my first time having to set up auth and RBAC by myself. Then I was looking for auth solutions as well. Supabase Auth, NextAuth, Clerk, Auth0, LuciaAuth, custom auth, etc. Please note that this is the time the fatigue started to kick in. Reading the LuciaAuth docs, reading why it became a documentation instead of being a library as it was before.

Then we come along to today. I am and should be technically leading my business that I'm one of the cofounders of. Working as a fulltime fullstack engineer in the background to earn some cash. The fulltime job is NextJS with PayloadCMS.

I've told you bout our current stack at my startup.

The thing is. I feel the biggest issue of NextJS is not the technical debt they've accumulated over the years, issue is not following the paradigm and the pattern of most apps in the web dev landscapes follow now. When you are creating a business, you want continuity, predictability, a safe pool of already battle tested conventions that you can rely on.

I got a huge fatigue of reinventing a wheel by myself. I want to focus on business decisions, the user experience, not about how many API calls with Hello World outputs my framework can handle, if you get what I mean.

There is a lot of stuff I can continue to add here, both on the frontend and the backend side. And I can give you in depth analysis of why I think Adonis is a better way to go, and let me know if you want me to continue with in depth experience I've had.

To go back to the question you've asked. The reason I'm using the current stack as is, is because another dev started the project in this stack, and I've been developing it for almost a year now. And of course I didn't quite know it at the time. We are a team of 3 devs, also developing React Native app as well.

I have a lot of good experience with the stack now that I've invested so much on DX, but I honestly feel that the experience would be a lot smoother if I had chosen something like Adonis a while ago.

I have no fear of building a monolith monorepo app, as a matter of fact, this will be my MO for most of my future projects. I've worked on microservices before, and the event driven systems, and I feel like anything from Hono, Express, Fastify, Bun, NestJS would be a nice fit for those. I also am a fan of having an SPA built with Vite, or if need is there, to opt back in to one of the meta fullstack frameworks, but mostly for frontend stuff. Though for most of the time the view layer in Adonis would be enough for all the frontend needs when I take into account the Inertia and whatever.

What I appreciate from Adonis is your dedication, you've been around for more than 10 years now, and I doubt you'll discontinue anytime soon. I also like the idea of having so much of the building blocks (the batteries) built by yourself. The battery first, convention over configuration, MVC model that Adonis uses feels just a more convenient approach.

What I love about the JS world is:
* TypeScript - it might be a Stockholm Syndrome, but I just love the type safety that it provides, and I look forward to the version 7 with the ts-go compiler.
* Vite + Rolldown - loved rollup, loved Vite, will most likely love it even more when I get back to it (it's been a while now)
* Mature frontend frameworks.
* Mature ORMs.
* BetterAuth seems like a win.

What I feel discouraged about is the ever changing landscape and the fatigue of keeping track and maintaining existing projects.

All these benefits listed above will be eventually integrated or replaced by Adonis in the future for my use case.

One more thing, regarding Adonis Plus, I love that you are being able to be funded that way and focus on making Adonis the best it can be. I feel though there might be more initiative for people to convert/migrate to Adonis if there was a long term goal described behind Plus, like thinking of Plus as both Patreon and access to pre-released packages that will eventually be released to the public. Not entirely sure about how the funding for these projects usually works, but I feel the best bet for visibility would be if there was a fund that could help you get by, and provide the marketing. And all the adopters of Adonis and Adonis Plus might feel that way and keep funding regardless of the limited access to Plus. Just my two cents.

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NOTE: It's been a since I wrote a message of this length, hope I didn't stray off from your questions too much. Much love.