This content originally appeared on daverupert.com and was authored by daverupert.com
We had Peter Pistorius on ShopTalk to talk about RedwoodJS and the project’s pivot to an almost entirely different project called RedwoodSDK. I am a complete outsider but I liked what RedwoodJS (the old project) was trying to do and didn’t fully understand why they felt the need to reboot. I even have a dusty old post in my drafts folder about what I liked about RedwoodJS. But after talking, it seems the winds of the JavaScript zeitgeist has changed and technology picks from 2020 aren’t the best deep integrations to have anymore.
After talking to Peter, I was pleasantly surprised by the principles that guide the new RedwoodSDK project:
- Zero magic - No codegen or transpiler side effects
- Composability over configuration - No opinionated wrappers
- Uses native Web APIs - No abstraction over fetch, Request, Response, or URL
Those are all principles I can get behind. But what impressed me the most was how RedwoodSDK prioritizes economic justice at the framework level. Peter from the show:
We set up with these principles, and we wrote them down, and they come from a place where I am geographically located. The principles are informed from where I am right now in South Africa. We have really poor people and really rich people. I think we have the highest income disparity in the world… People here don’t have very good mobile phones, they have mobile phones – everyone does – the networks are also pretty fast but bandwidth is expensive and so is memory on phones, and phones are slow. They’re not the best things you have out there. So we designed this framework with these principles in mind in order to deliver the least amount of JavaScript and consume the least amount of bandwidth
For RedwoodSDK, this principle manifests in minimal code sent to the client via React Server Components. RedwoodSDK also has a tight integration with Cloudflare and its edge worker platform which (for most folks) is free. That in turn reduces costs for website owners and customers, which is beneficial in markets with low-bandwidth or pay-per-gigabyte mobile connections.
No $20/mo hosting lock-in scheme.
For Redwood, the goal isn’t to power the next big billion dollar SaaS product (although I’m sure they’d welcome that), but to enable “homegrown” or home-cooked web apps that are easy to build, maintain, and low-cost to run. Allow people to build that bespoke app for their bespoke need for themselves or their community. Their new tagline is “This could be the start of something small” and the tech world needs more of that.
I wish Web Components had a project like this…
This content originally appeared on daverupert.com and was authored by daverupert.com
daverupert.com | Sciencx (2025-06-18T14:06:00+00:00) The unsung principles of RedwoodSDK. Retrieved from https://www.scien.cx/2025/06/18/the-unsung-principles-of-redwoodsdk/
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