Express is outdated (in terms of active development).
I prefer Fastify since it has very good schema validation and error handling built in.
Ask HN: Is Express still "de-facto" for building Node back ends?
11–20 of 100 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is Express still "de-facto" for building Node back ends?
#12Last I checked, Express is extremely slow and will significantly impact your SEO if you're a content business and doesn't really scale very well if you get huge amounts of traffic like I have.
These days I use Go, Deno or Crystal which is much faster.
For hosting I recommend Cloudflare Pages, Vercel, (maybe Netlify) and Render.
Re: Ask HN: Is Express still "de-facto" for building Node back ends?
#13No - please check out Hono https://github.com/honojs/hono
The presence of alternatives doesn't mean something isn't the "de facto".
In all the times I've evaluated all of the alternatives to Express, this is the first time I'm ever heard of hono
Re: Ask HN: Is Express still "de-facto" for building Node back ends?
#14Last I checked, Express is extremely slow and will significantly impact your SEO if you're a content business and doesn't really scale very well if you get huge amounts of traffic like I have. These days I use Go, Deno or Crystal which is much faster. For hosting I recommend Cloudflare Pages, Vercel, (maybe Netlify) and Render.
The frontend impacts your SEO way more than your backend, especially if you're using a typical framework. Additionally, things like your database (more specifically, your schema and your queries) will impact the speed of your backend more than any particular library.
Re: Ask HN: Is Express still "de-facto" for building Node back ends?
#15I'd definitely suggest at least considering Nest.JS.
There's totally nothing wrong with Express (or Koa or Fastify) projects, but Express based projects tend to share problems with all others based on minimalistic-based frameworks - no skeleton means tons of discussions about favorite ORM, Logger, Validation, whole story about service vs helpers etc.
If I can skip it, I always do. Decision paralysis can be a killer.
Re: Ask HN: Is Express still "de-facto" for building Node back ends?
#16If you don’t have time to do research then surely you don’t have time to learn a new tool, right? Just use Express.
Asking others isn’t research?
Re: Ask HN: Is Express still "de-facto" for building Node back ends?
#17Last I checked, Express is extremely slow and will significantly impact your SEO if you're a content business and doesn't really scale very well if you get huge amounts of traffic like I have. These days I use Go, Deno or Crystal which is much faster. For hosting I recommend Cloudflare Pages, Vercel, (maybe Netlify) and Render.
Express by itself isn't slow at all, neither does if affect your SEO.
You completely ignored OP's question, lol.
Re: Ask HN: Is Express still "de-facto" for building Node back ends?
#18I mean, it depends on who your asking. Express has effectively been abandoned.
In 2023 many would recommend Fastify as a go-to.
Re: Ask HN: Is Express still "de-facto" for building Node back ends?
#19I'd say adonis is the best now as you can iterate to a full product very quickly.
It's full stack but still amazingly fast (comparable to fastify). You can choose what you need in order to improve speed too. The syntax mimics Laravel which is the easiest to use, most complete full stack framework of any language.
Obviously, somewhat opinionated claims and my main job isn't programming so take it for what it's worth.
Re: Ask HN: Is Express still "de-facto" for building Node back ends?
#20Express is outdated (in terms of active development). I prefer Fastify since it has very good schema validation and error handling built in.
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