An Update on Fresh

Summary

Fresh is a simple web framework based on the latest web standards that we built and use quite heavily here at Deno. We’ve teased the next version for quite some time now, but haven’t yet cut a release. Rest assured we haven’t forgotten about it. In fact, a pre-release version of Fresh 2 is being used in production here at Deno — on our main website as well as on Deno Deploy. Whenever we post an update regarding Deno on any of our social channels, many of you ask: What about Fresh 2? After all, we have announced plans to start working on Fresh 2 a long while ago and it isn’t out yet a year later. So this blog post is an update on where we’re at. Why Fresh 2? The first version of Fresh was originally created as a simple way to build websites leveraging the latest web technologies available in Deno. It quickly rose in popularity among Deno users, so much so that Fresh 1.0 became one of the top starred GitHub frontend projects that year. Since then, we pushed many improvements, like becoming faster, new features like Partials and a lot of polish. However, as the needs of Fresh projects grew, we encountered new challenges. Projects with larger islands, more routes, more assets, as well as a desire to extend aspects of Fresh were pushing the limits of the Fresh 1 code base. Adding new features became harder and harder and it was obvious that we needed a better foundation to make Fresh advance. This is a normal part of the evolution of a software project; you try an approach, see what works and what doesn’t, and iterate from there. We got to work and, with all the learnings from Fresh, built a new architecture for Fresh 2. Why the delay? Building a truly next-generation framework sometimes means reinforcing the underlying foundations first. To make Fresh 2.0 faster, more extensible, and more delightful to use than ever before, we dedicated significant effort to enhancing the core Deno platform and our JavaScript registry, JSR. While this foundational work was time-intensiv...