I’ve Been a React Developer for 5 Years but This Feature Is Why I’m Most Excited About SvelteKit

Initially, I was not a fan of Svelte. Directives, templating? Everything in a <script> tag? Filenames ending in .svelte? What was the world coming to?! This was back in the Sapper days, and I didn’t give it a fair shot. I heard Scott talk about it on Syntax for the billionth time, and I decided to give it another look. I’m glad I did; there are many things to like about Svelte, and specifically SvelteKit, after getting over my initial bias.

Enter SvelteKit

Last fall, I was slowly migrating my site to NextJS from Gatsby. I have a thing for static site generators; I think they’re fun to tinker with. While I haven’t fully ported my site over, I spent some time getting a little Rick and Morty API explorer together to test the waters.

The Files are in the computer

One of the features I really like about SvelteKit is the filesystem-based router. The folder structure of your app is what defines the routes. The other benefit of this is that the routes are your pages, but they can also be your endpoints, allowing you to quickly build out an API without having to set up an entire server. Even going so far as being able to hook into Netlify functions, database connections, or some third-party API.

I still really like React and use it in my day-to-day, but I’m going to be reaching for Svelte going forward for personal projects.