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Ask HN: What novel tools are you using to write web sites/apps?

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Re: Ask HN: What novel tools are you using to write web sites/apps?

#181

I switched to Elixir/Phoenix + LiveView for my stack. - Content all markdown - Tailwindcss for styling - Phoenix provides a extremely fast framework - No database at the moment - CI/CD with github actions - Automated deployments with Gigalixir I switched to gatsby and I notice that I was spending more time fighting the system than writing. You can check it out here: https://allanmacgregor.com/posts and the code is av…

Considering using tailwind too. Only thing is, it doesn't work so well for the generated markdown html output you don't control, esp. when using many plugins to markdown parser (Mermaid, PlantUML, etc.).

Re: Ask HN: What novel tools are you using to write web sites/apps?

#182
I'm a college student trying to get into software development. I was recently hired to build a dashboard around some data stuck in an archaic platform.

I went with Phoenix and Elixir, and I really liked the combination of a focus on development enjoyment (inspired by Ruby on Rails) combined with an anti-magic attitude, so you can trace through what actually executes pretty easily. I haven't had much other experience though, so that that with a large grain of salt.

My client was very happy with the speed of development and quality of the final product, so I consider it a successful choice by the main metric that matters here.

Edit: The main pain point has been deployment. I spent an afternoon on some shell scripts that scp to a virtual server that mostly work fine, but I don't understand sysadmining very well and I I'm pretty sure they'll blow up on me at some point. It would be really nice if there was a tool that took care of the actual servers part for me.

Re: Ask HN: What novel tools are you using to write web sites/apps?

#183
post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The post was about 'novel' tools. I really dont see what is novel about your approach

Let me quote the OP: > I'd like to hear about different approaches others are using to write web sites or apps today. What languages, frameworks, or libraries are you using? So the question as I understood it was not "what truly novel and unique approach you're using that no one else has before?" but more of a "what non-mainstream approach you're using?". And what I'm doing is definitely non-mainstream.

Actually, the title of the post specifically says "novel tools". That apparently didn't make it into the body of the post, but almost everyone is primed by the title to expect novel solutions in the answers.

That said, I don't think there's any harm in reminding people that there are plenty of non-novel solutions already that they might not have fully considered.

Re: Ask HN: What novel tools are you using to write web sites/apps?

#184

I'm a college student trying to get into software development. I was recently hired to build a dashboard around some data stuck in an archaic platform. I went with Phoenix and Elixir, and I really liked the combination of a focus on development enjoyment (inspired by Ruby on Rails) combined with an anti-magic attitude, so you can trace through what actually executes pretty easily. I haven't had much other experience…

My main issue with Elixir (and maybe this has changed in the last 3 years since I looked at it), is that there isn't a strong open source package libraries available like you see in Rails. People complained that you end up writing boiler plate code for things that in Node or Ruby would just be a package.

I've heard great things about the language and framework though.

Re: Ask HN: What novel tools are you using to write web sites/apps?

#185
I use Cloudbackend [1] to create my projects serverless sql database and APIs with the API builder, it's generating the node.js code and publish it to aws lambda. For the frontend I use either Vanilla js (no framework) or Vue.js [1] https://cloudbackend.appdrag.com/

Re: Ask HN: What novel tools are you using to write web sites/apps?

#186

This is the first thread in a long while that's given me a lot of FOMO anxiety. I've made a lot of one-off server-side rendered apps in Flask, and right now I'm doing some backend work ASP.NET Core for my job, but I have this overwhelming feeling there's so much I don't know and I'm not sure where to start. I only bring this up in case I'm not the only person sharing these feelings.

Im even lower-level in the stack, and some of the comments make me want to just learn php. I remember one comment where Joel Spolsky wrote on twitter where he wrote stack overflow in asp .net and scaled it running on one box. Its all about getting stuff done.

Re: Ask HN: What novel tools are you using to write web sites/apps?

#187

I am an amateur dev writing things mostly for myself, just a few were worth sharing as open source. I use Quasar (based on Vue) for everything. Yes, it makes it look like I have a hammer and everything looks like a Quasar-Vue nail,but it always works. Everything is enclosed, components, canvas,... SPAs are easy, WPAs are easy, everything is easy. The community could be better but the docs are excellent. I've learned…

This is slightly unrelated but I looked up Quasar and their homepage ( https://quasar.dev/ ) is the first website that literally makes me nauseous just by looking at it. That's a kind of UX problem I didn't even consider to exist a few minutes ago.

Oh my god that's bad. What a dumpster fire.

- nauseating animaton

- nervous animated chevron that looks clickable but isn't

- scroll down to be greeted by a "youtube face"

- feature descriptions written in light grey text on bright blue backround with white specks moving through the text

This website really doesn't want you to stay.

Re: Ask HN: What novel tools are you using to write web sites/apps?

#188

I am an amateur dev writing things mostly for myself, just a few were worth sharing as open source. I use Quasar (based on Vue) for everything. Yes, it makes it look like I have a hammer and everything looks like a Quasar-Vue nail,but it always works. Everything is enclosed, components, canvas,... SPAs are easy, WPAs are easy, everything is easy. The community could be better but the docs are excellent. I've learned…

This is slightly unrelated but I looked up Quasar and their homepage ( https://quasar.dev/ ) is the first website that literally makes me nauseous just by looking at it. That's a kind of UX problem I didn't even consider to exist a few minutes ago.

I bet there's maybe a kilobyte of that that has any value.

Re: Ask HN: What novel tools are you using to write web sites/apps?

#189
post #184

I'm a college student trying to get into software development. I was recently hired to build a dashboard around some data stuck in an archaic platform. I went with Phoenix and Elixir, and I really liked the combination of a focus on development enjoyment (inspired by Ruby on Rails) combined with an anti-magic attitude, so you can trace through what actually executes pretty easily. I haven't had much other experience…

My main issue with Elixir (and maybe this has changed in the last 3 years since I looked at it), is that there isn't a strong open source package libraries available like you see in Rails. People complained that you end up writing boiler plate code for things that in Node or Ruby would just be a package. I've heard great things about the language and framework though.

I haven't run into many issues where I wished there was a package, but I haven't programmed a web app in a language that had a lot of packages available.

The main close call I had on this project was that there was only one package that supports generating excel spreadsheets, and it's a labor of love by one person. This wasn't a huge issue for me, I had a plan to write csv and then convert if it didn't work, as I didn't need formatting/fancy output. It turned out to work great, so that wasn't necessary.

There was an excellent transactional email library that hooked into the standard templating system, and a few so-so approaches to authentication. I ended up rolling my own on top of a decent crypto library.

For the non-web-speicfic bits I haven't found this to be an issue, Erlang has a whole kitchen sink with OTP (even if like a real kitchen sink it's a bit grungy if you look inside), and I've found plenty of algorithm/data structure-y packages.

Re: Ask HN: What novel tools are you using to write web sites/apps?

#190
post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you even need diffing if, for example, the relevant nodes had an ID functionally derived from their contents?

Sorry, I'm not sure I understand your question? Basically, I use diffing because it's simple. I don't want to mess around with manually updating whatever content I want to update, and I don't want to be forced to generate a specially crafted piece of HTML so that it's updatable. This way I only have to have only one function that updates the current page in-place by diffing, and I can use it everywhere I need to.

I meant that the old tree and the new tree both originate from the same source (i.e., your code), and if both were annotated with some kind of hashes of their contents, you wouldn't need any diffing to find the changes. You could simply compare the annotations on corresponding pairs of nodes and if they're the same, you don't need to descend any further and compare their contents - you already know than anything below that node is going to be identical.

Also, have you compared the performance of whatever you're doing with a simple PJAX-like approach? Considering that browsers are very good at parsing HTML, I wonder how fast that would be compared to doing quite a lot of DOM calls, which you seem to be doing (?). I'd definitely be interested in that comparison.

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