The @sveltejs/adapter-vercel NPM module has seen some impressive growth over the last two months. In early November 2021 it was seeing about 4,000 weekly downloads. As of mid-January 2022 that number has climbed to over 18,000. What’s fueling the growth? Vercel’s zero-configuration deployments of SvelteKit perhaps? Nope, most certainly it was Rich Harris joining the Vercel team which was announced at the same time the adapter started taking off.

I earlier this month I spent way too much time trying to SFTP to Ubuntu Server with Sublime Text. The purpose of the SFTP effort was to set myself up for developing modern web applications on a new Windows 8 machine I bought to play SimCity 2013. And after getting everything working I realized the SFTP method had some gremlins and the file syncing reminded me of Dreamweaver—it simply wasn’t fast enough.

Lately, unless you were running a Linux machine or had the pleasure of owning a Mac with OS X, developing modern web applications has been a bit of a kludge. Enter Vagrant.

Vagrant is a tool for building complete development environments. With an easy-to-use workflow and focus on automation, Vagrant lowers development environment setup time, increases development/production parity, and makes the “works on my machine” excuse a relic of the past.

In this article I’ll explain how to set up a development environment in Windows using a virtualized Linux box, suitable for rapid prototyping. Then I’ll take it a step further and explain how to integrate a Backbone-based application framework with Vagrant and Sublime Text, greatly increasing the speed for developing modern web applications on Windows.

Spike at Airbnb just mentioned during a live TechTalk webcast that the Rendr framework they built was open sourced earlier this month:  github.com/airbnb/rendr. The framework leverages Node.js and Backbone.js to allow full-stack JavaScript MVC using a common set of code–greatly improving time to content, improving crawability, and reduces overall application complexity.

During the talk, Meteor and Derby were mentioned, and Mojito *sigh*. And Stitch was also mentioned, as a part of the stack they’re using. So anyway, there you have it. The Holy Grail I talked about. It’s out, but admittedly, according to Spike, not quite finished. Caveat emptor.