--- title: The Islands Architecture Is a Confession: If You Need... description: Islands architecture is framed not as an innovation but as an admission that full client-side hydration was the wrong default. The argument draws on research... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/the-islands-architecture-is-a-confession-if-you-need-partial-hydration-you-already-lost-jrrgq0kaw twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: The Islands Architecture Is a Confession: If You Need Partial Hydration, You Already Lost | daily.dev og:description: Islands architecture is framed not as an innovation but as an admission that full client-side hydration was the wrong default. The argument draws on research... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/the-islands-architecture-is-a-confession-if-you-need-partial-hydration-you-already-lost-jrrgq0kaw og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/JrRgq0Kaw.png og:image:alt: The Islands Architecture Is a Confession: If You Need Partial Hydration, You Already Lost og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # The Islands Architecture Is a Confession: If You Need Partial Hydration, You Already Lost **[Medium](https://daily.dev/sources/medium_js)** · 6 min read · 1 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary Islands architecture is framed not as an innovation but as an admission that full client-side hydration was the wrong default. The argument draws on research by a Google Angular engineer who found more marketing language than shared understanding around partial hydration, and observations from SolidJS creator Ryan Carniato that partial hydration only works when designed in from the start. The proliferation of terms like progressive hydration, donut hydration, and resumability all represent independent frameworks hitting the same wall and patching it differently. The alternative proposed is server-driven approaches like HTMX that never required hydration in the first place, making islands strategies unnecessary rather than clever. The author promotes their own project, Logical Brutalism, as an embodiment of this server-first philosophy. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Questions this post answers ### Why is partial hydration hard to implement across different JavaScript frameworks? Partial hydration requires components that don't rerun unnecessarily, fine-grained update mechanisms, and architectural decisions made from a framework's design phase rather than added later. SolidJS creator Ryan Carniato has explained that frameworks retrofitting partial hydration onto an existing full-hydration model face a much harder problem than frameworks designed around partial hydration from the start. _daily.dev surfaces framework design tradeoffs like this for engineers weighing rendering architecture choices._ ### What did Google's research into partial hydration across frameworks find? A Google engineer working on Angular, Jessica Janiuk, spent six to eight months researching partial hydration and found that despite it being a trendy topic discussed heavily among framework authors, there was little agreement on what it actually meant in practice, and genuine working support for it across major frameworks was far rarer than the conversation suggested. _Engineers deciding between hydration strategies can track findings like this through daily.dev._ ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [Different hydration and rendering strategies](https://daily.dev/posts/different-hydration-and-rendering-strategies-uy1xqwg3n) · Neciu Dan · 46 upvotes · 4 comments - [The right way to architect modern web applications](https://daily.dev/posts/the-right-way-to-architect-modern-web-applications-owyoaycki) · InfoWorld · 2 upvotes · 1 comments - [Server Components vs. Islands Architecture: The performance showdown](https://daily.dev/posts/server-components-vs-islands-architecture-the-performance-showdown-cvhnnwdoc) · LogRocket · 6 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#webdev](https://daily.dev/tags/webdev), [#astro](https://daily.dev/tags/astro), [#htmx](https://daily.dev/tags/htmx) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/the-islands-architecture-is-a-confession-if-you-need-partial-hydration-you-already-lost-jrrgq0kaw) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"The Islands Architecture Is a Confession: If You Need Partial Hydration, You Already Lost","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/the-islands-architecture-is-a-confession-if-you-need-partial-hydration-you-already-lost-jrrgq0kaw","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/the-islands-architecture-is-a-confession-if-you-need-partial-hydration-you-already-lost-jrrgq0kaw"},"datePublished":"2026-07-26T13:11:37.621Z","dateModified":"2026-09-14T06:01:41.861Z","description":"Islands architecture is framed not as an innovation but as an admission that full client-side hydration was the wrong default. 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