New React Framework?

[kas-catholic]

confessit-web was originally created with create-react-app in 2019. While it has served us pretty well for five years and still works fine, it might be worth migrating to a (newer) framework. Doing so might get us these benefits:

• Pre-render static HTML for SEO. (A chance to move www.confessit.app into this repo.)
• Better PWA behavior.
• Opinionated (& widely used) dev environment config, file structure, etc.
• Upgrade React while we're at it.

Any new framework we'd use must satisfy these requirements:

• No dynamic web server. This is a client side app and it should remain that way. We should be able to serve it as static HTML, CSS, and JS. No SSR.
• Probably still react-based. It would be a bigger migration to switch to Vue, for example.

Astro seems like perhaps a good candidate. It's static content mode would work well for us.

Next.js also supports a static export using either the app or pages router, though NextJS seems to be leaning heavily into SSR.

This might be a good opportunity to consider React Native or Expo. Even if we remain web-only for now, using Expo would provide an opportunity to expand to native apps (distributed via app stores) later.

Thoughts?

[b-a-merritt]

Expo is an excellent tool for simple apps. I've used it for two apps, and it streamlines much of the deployment process. I've only used it for iOS and Android, never for the web, so I can't recommend it there.