Express is outdated (in terms of active development).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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Ask HN: Is Express still "de-facto" for building Node back ends?
21–30 of 100 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is Express still "de-facto" for building Node back ends?
#22I'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.
Not a fan of the class-based approach.
Re: Ask HN: Is Express still "de-facto" for building Node back ends?
#23I used to do more node work, and that was mostly pre v4. Express was the go-to. There’s more options out there now. I did a bit of research a few years back, and my go-to now is Fastify. https://fastify.dev/
Could you share a bit more of your reasoning for choosing Fastify over Express and how was your experience since you switched?
Express is my go-to but I'm always open to improving my ways.
Re: Ask HN: Is Express still "de-facto" for building Node back ends?
#24Re: Ask HN: Is Express still "de-facto" for building Node back ends?
#25I'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.
Not a fan of the class-based approach.
Fair enough. Most JavaScript code seems to avoid classes so it can be a little jarring if you're not use to it.
Re: Ask HN: Is Express still "de-facto" for building Node back ends?
#26Wait... wasn't koa supposed to replace express ? What happened to it (and hapi) ?
Re: Ask HN: Is Express still "de-facto" for building Node back ends?
#27I'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.
Nest is definitely more polarizing than fastify/express etc but I love it.
I wanted something opinionated that stops me from trying to always find the "best" solution to every problem.
Re: Ask HN: Is Express still "de-facto" for building Node back ends?
#28I tend to use hapi (https://hapi.dev) instead of Express if I need to write a quick backend for something these days.
Fastify looks nice too but I haven't used it.
Been burnt by full-stack frameworks in the past (e.g. Meteor) but they can be a good option for some.
Re: Ask HN: Is Express still "de-facto" for building Node back ends?
#29It seems like it. There are alternatives like Koa and Fastify, but none of seem to strike quite the balance that express does. I pray that one day express 5 will get released and they’ll finally fix the whole async middleware not handling errors properly thing though. That’s gotta be one of the most annoying quirks that has just been quietly sitting there untouched for years at this point. Maybe one day. I guess ther…
> async middleware not handling errors properly thing though
Can you expand on this? Error handling in middleware is pretty well documented.
Re: Ask HN: Is Express still "de-facto" for building Node back ends?
#30It's still the most popular but for the past couple of years it hasn't seen any major updates and some people question if the project is abandoned. I switched to Fastify and haven't looked back.
some people use the word abandoned... some people use the word "finished"