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Ask HN: What's your favorite way of getting a web app up quickly in 2018?

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Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite way of getting a web app up quickly in 2018?

#101

Post by catfood »

I don't do anything special for prototyping, I just use what I normally do if I were creating the real thing.

> django-admin startproject > copy+paste my webpack config for React > copy+paste my general management scripts into the package.json (mostly scripts to build the client, and if working locally also start a server)

Then if I want to deploy it, I just install nginx and gunicorn and again copy+paste my configs for those.

If I want to use mysql it's not too much trouble, takes 10 mins to get it up and running and my application hooked up to it.

Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite way of getting a web app up quickly in 2018?

#102

Post by Rjevski »

westoncb wrote: post #77
ireflect wrote: post #59

Here's my template: Backend in Go, hosted on Gitlab with CI to build it and create a docker image (also hosted at Gitlab). Server is a plain Debian server hosted on Digital Ocean, with some light configuration with Ansible. A single docker-compose.yml brings up the application along with any service dependencies. Generally I use nginx-proxy with its letsencrypt companion so I can multiplex several docker web services…

This sounds a lot like what I'm looking for. I haven't looked into Gitlab at all yet, so I'll to check them out.

GitLab has been a pain for me lately.

Chose them for a client due to built-in CI (as opposed to Github), but the HTTP response time on the web UI makes it painful to use - I'm routinely seeing ~1s response times on pull requests and CI pipelines, not to mention that the provided CI "runners" seem overloaded and your jobs often stay in a pending stage for several minutes (can be solved by running your own instance of gitlab-runner on an AWS box).

Personally I'm moving that project to Bitbucket - they now have CI pipelines too.

Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite way of getting a web app up quickly in 2018?

#103

Post by Rjevski »

hayksaakian wrote: post #21

Heroku is still a great choice if you're willing to pay to never think about infrastructure. On the other hand if you're willing to ask for help there are plenty of freelance IT admins who would set up a digital ocean box with the DIY equivalent of Heroku.

I would not recommend this unless you hire these people for a regular maintenance role.

Leaving a box with no monitoring and no on-site skill capable of fixing it is a bad idea. That box will explode at some point and it's going to explode at the worst possible moment, and you'll loose tons of business (and/or data) while you scramble to get someone to repair it.

Unless you have people ready to jump in and fix it should it break, don't risk it and just let Heroku handle it.

Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite way of getting a web app up quickly in 2018?

#104

Post by chuckdries »

I'm surprised nobody is talking about Express for the back end. Maybe it's because I hail from the front end world, but I'm already so comfortable in javascript I'm faster in it than if I had to learn anything else.

For the front end, I like Vue because it's just react with less boilerplate.

Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite way of getting a web app up quickly in 2018?

#105

Post by z92 »

nlawalker wrote: post #92
bo1024 wrote: post #57

I have trouble understanding where all this demand for webapps come from. As a browser of the web, the only webapps I use are Google's email, maps, and docs. What are all these webapps for and why doesn't HTML (maybe with a touch of javascript) suffice?

I have a slightly different question - many of the answers in here make it sound like creating and deploying a new web app is practically a twice-a-week kind of thing for quite a few folks. What kinds of things are people so frequently creating and putting up in a hurry?

A large portion of the apps are intranet thing, instead of Internet. Business apps that are used in house.

Plus almost all websites are a kind of web app. And these have a complex backend for managing the content. While we browse the front end.

Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite way of getting a web app up quickly in 2018?

#106

Post by dfitzpat »

My preferred solution is Waxx https://www.waxx.io - It is Ruby and very fast. Mostly functions, no classes. Deploy like this:

waxx deploy stage or waxx deploy prod

The deploy script can be as simple as:

cd /path/to/folder && git pull && waxx migrate && waxx restart

Disclaimer: I am the author of Waxx and I wrote it to be as simple as possible yet still high performance and flexible.

Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite way of getting a web app up quickly in 2018?

#107

Post by fyfy18 »

nooyurrsdey wrote: post #63

For some reason people seem to constant doubt Ruby-ists and Rails Devs. I completely get that other languages have huge benefits over Ruby. Golang being compiled or Java running anywhere, etc... And ruby is slow, totally understood. But if youre talking about getting a functioning webapp up and running quickly ... no way anyone is beating a Rails dev in setting one up. The piping and scaffolding are all built in and…

I’d say the slowness of Ruby is really over exaggerated. For most web applications it’s good enough, and the speed of development (how fast you can ship) almost always outweighs any costs from it being slow.

You can always replace the endpoints that are slow with something written in a more performant language like Golang or Erlang later.

I’ve worked on all sorts of applications from corporate CRUD to mobile billing gateways written in Ruby (usually Rails), and in very few cases has Ruby itself been the bottleneck.

Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite way of getting a web app up quickly in 2018?

#108

Post by giancarlostoro »

Usually CherryPy, Mako and MongoDB. Its how I won TADHack Mini 2018. I was able to focus on getting things to work more than how they work. CherryPy is older than Flask and OO based. Mako is a performant templating library that Reddit used and still might. MongoDB is just a document database so schema that changes isn't a big deal aka perfect for prototyping.

However I am making a shift to using D so I am learning DiamondMVC which is inspired by ASP .NET MVC and takes full advantage of Vibe.d and all the rest of the D ecosystem is available to me as a result. If I need something done in a weekend CherryPy and Mako with any DB.

If I wanna get something quick that I wont have to worry too much about scaling then D with Vibe.d or D with DiamondMVC is great. The best part about D is there is no crazy learning curve like Rust and it is very highly performant. Also the VS Code plugin is nice enough to make me productive enough.

Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite way of getting a web app up quickly in 2018?

#109

Post by chrisco255 »

slimshady94 wrote: post #82

Nodejs + Angular + Heroku. Surprised to see only 3-4 nodejs comments till now, compared to many more Go comments. Has the tide turned, is Go the new nodejs? :(

Go has some performance benefits over Node, especially when running CPU intensive tasks (Node is solid for I/O). They're both hugely successful platforms though. I think there are huge productivity advantages to using Node on the backend. Context switching between programming languages and platforms is expensive for humans, so...Node is a win for productivity if you already know JS well enough.

Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite way of getting a web app up quickly in 2018?

#110

Post by meesterdude »

fyfy18 wrote: post #107
nooyurrsdey wrote: post #63

For some reason people seem to constant doubt Ruby-ists and Rails Devs. I completely get that other languages have huge benefits over Ruby. Golang being compiled or Java running anywhere, etc... And ruby is slow, totally understood. But if youre talking about getting a functioning webapp up and running quickly ... no way anyone is beating a Rails dev in setting one up. The piping and scaffolding are all built in and…

I’d say the slowness of Ruby is really over exaggerated. For most web applications it’s good enough, and the speed of development (how fast you can ship) almost always outweighs any costs from it being slow. You can always replace the endpoints that are slow with something written in a more performant language like Golang or Erlang later. I’ve worked on all sorts of applications from corporate CRUD to mobile billing…

iirc, the ruby 3x3 benchmark project is getting a ruby game (i think mario) to run at 60fps, and ruby 2.5 already hit that target.

even if it's slow today; the runtime is being improved regularly and making a lot of code just faster with a version bump.

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