Summary

In this first chapter, we introduced Remix as a full stack web framework. Remix promotes the usage of the web platform and lets you take advantage of standard web APIs. It bridges the network gap by tightly integrating the frontend and the backend. This allows Remix to do some cool things.

We also looked at the philosophy behind Remix. The team behind Remix emphasizes avoidance of over-abstraction. Its mission is to let you build fast, slick, and resilient user experiences. The vision is to let you deliver software that people will love.

We introduced the terms primitives, conventions, and levers to categorize Remix’s different features. Primitives are the exposed utilities that can be imported and used in our code. Conventions are contracts such as file and folder naming conventions that are used to avoid tedious configuration. Levers are options provided by Remix that allow us to optimize our application for what’s important to us.

You also learned more about what Remix does behind the scenes. Remix takes on three distinct responsibilities. It is a compiler, a router, and a runtime. Combining those three responsibilities in one framework enables great things, such as flattening request waterfalls and avoiding the frontend-backend split by co-locating client and server code.

In this chapter, we touched upon many concepts, such as server-side rendering, prefetching, and client-side routing. We will revisit all the mentioned concepts throughout this book. In the next chapter, we start our Remix development journey and create a “Hello World” Remix app.