Architecture

Fresh is designed to make it easy to build fast, scalable, and reliable applications. To do this, it makes opinionated decisions about how one should build web applications. These decisions are backed by strong empirical data gathered from experts in the field. Some examples of these principles are:

• Page load times should be reduced to a minimum.
• The work performed on the client should be minimized.
• Errors should have a small blast radius - stuff should gracefully degrade.

The single biggest architecture decision that Fresh makes is its usage of the islands architecture pattern. This means that Fresh applications ship pure HTML to the client by default. Parts of a server-rendered page can then be independently re-hydrated with interactive widgets (islands). This means that the client is only responsible for rendering parts of the page that are interactive enough to warrant the extra effort. Any content that is purely static does not have related client-side JavaScript and is thus very lightweight.