# Introduction

Quercia is a framework laveraging the react UI library to build monolithic web applications highly inspired by next. It enables you to build the backend in your favourite language and talk to the client in an effortless and familiar way.

# Why?

If you have ever used next or nuxt(vue counterpart) or sapper(svelte counterpart) you have experienced the great comfort of the good 'ol filesystem-based routing approach, coming from the examples of monoliths application writte in languages like php or ruby, but also enjoying the latest features of web development with cutting edge frameworks like react or vue. The aim of quercia is to allow backend or full-stack developers to interact with these new technologies while still providing a familiar experience.

# How?

With quercia you can write your pages routes in a declarativ way just like with next but you also get the added comfort and speed of a backend in another language, like Go for example. This could be a folder structure for a Go-based project for example:





 



 


├── __quercia         # this is where your compiled files will live
├── main.go
├── node_modules      # modules from npm
├── package.json
├── pages             # the pages folder holds your react routes
│   ├── _app.tsx      # a wrapper arround every page's element
│   ├── _document.tsx # a custom <html> base template
│   └── index.tsx
└── routes            # the routes folder holds your back-end rendering routes
    └── index.go

If you have ever used next, nuxt or sapper this will look very familiar to you. Also if you have ever wrote code for languages like php this will make you feel at home.

# Differences from inertia

Inertia is a great project, and I myself took a lot of inspiration from their work, but there are some I whish were different:

  • The choiche of using larvel-mix for bundling
  • The lack of a Go backend, which is the main language I use
  • The way that inertia requires pages and builds the final bundled application (using an import('./pages/*.js'))

Also we have some improvements or new features added compared to Inertia:

  • We support only one UI library which is react and offer "syntactic sugar" like the _app and _document pages, as opposed to modifying the template.php in Inertia
  • A webpack.config.js-like configuration file(quercia.config.js)
  • A next-like approach to pages bundling using a single chunk for each page, enabling more fine-grained optimizations

Setup →