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Ask HN: What are the best web tools to build basic web apps as of October 2016?

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Re: Ask HN: What are the best web tools to build basic web apps as of October 2016?

#32

Post by machiaweliczny »

1. I would go with VueJS for frontend - see example https://vuejs.org/examples/tree-view.html Definitely can recommend handling of complex state through redux/vuex.

For backend: Go with anything that you are proficient with. If you aren't familiar with anything I recommend starting with RubyOnRails/Sinatra/Django/web2py/Phoenix.

2. Yes - http://bestof.js.org/ See also http://stateofjs.com/2016/introduction/ ,

Re: Ask HN: What are the best web tools to build basic web apps as of October 2016?

#35

Post by xiaoma »

If you're building a basic webapp, you shouldn't be using a front-end framework at all!

React has one of the gentler learning curves of the front end frameworks, but it's still a lot more work than just rendering everything server-side and adding whatever minimal effects you need with jQuery.

I second sandGorgon's recommendation to use Rails. PHP is another good option. It's absolutely amazing how many successful new software companies are being built off of WordPress and/or Laravel.

I say this as someone who was using React in February 2014 and who loves to geek out over newer more powerful technologies. The thing is, your users don't care. Groupon was launched as a crappy WordPress site + a mailing list, built way past its breaking point, migrated to Rails, broke again and was a $5B company in 5 years. Many, many startups with harder-core technologists started years earlier still haven't reached where they are now even with a perpetual string of problems and failures from their IPO until now. Teespring started on Rails long after that was cool and they're a juggernaut.

Use something productive and ship it.

Re: Ask HN: What are the best web tools to build basic web apps as of October 2016?

#36

Post by mark_l_watson »

aban wrote: post #27

I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest this stack (especially if you're into functional programming): Haskell + Elm or PureScript + Postgres The best part about it is that it helps you catch many errors at compile time, instead of having your app crash at run time. For keeping your Haskell and Elm data types in sync while maintaining sanity, I recommend elm-export [0], which will automatically generate the Elm typ…

Thanks for the recommendations. I need to study both Elm (never used it) and PureScript (have just played with it). I am almost ready to publish my first Haskell book (my take on getting started the easy way, with a tutorial for a subset of the language and some cookbook style coding recipes to play with). I am thinking of doing a volume II cookbook that covers web development, and other topics. I use scotty and yesod, and experimenting with Elm and PureScript sounds good.

Re: Ask HN: What are the best web tools to build basic web apps as of October 2016?

#38

Post by drum »

sandGorgon wrote: post #10

Are you an experienced web programmer and already know how to manage migrations, CDN, REST apis, etc ? If not, I would still go with Rails. Its massively productive, batteries included... and forces you to learn some practices that you can later take to other frameworks (migrations, asset pipeline, etc). I dont know of any other framework that forces you to adopt these. On HN, you will find a lot of rhetoric against…

I can't agree with this more, and with the addition of Turbolinks in recent Rails versions you get the snappiness of a JS front end framework in areas like page load. After building a service oriented architecture with React and Rails I truly realized the benefit of a tightly coupled front end / backend for speed of development and deployment. Building bespoke API's for other clients isn't as much of a headache as it's been made out to be.

Re: Ask HN: What are the best web tools to build basic web apps as of October 2016?

#39

Post by blaze33 »

1. I work with Django, Django Rest Framework, React, works well. I heard that Vue might be an interesting option. Honestly there's a myriad of tools/framework around there, you have to ask yourself what are you trying to achieve? Is it a one shot app you'll build over the week end? Something that you'd like to maintain over time? That may scale? Are you working alone on this or not? Is it an exercise to learn a new stack? I started a startup 4 years ago, asked a friend who's a ruby/rails dev for advice about tech/stack, his answer, yes rails is awesome but as you already know python go for Django as my goal was primarily to get stuff done business-wise not so much to learn cool new tech. So be aware of your options and definitely spend some time to know them but in the end they're just tools, don't forget why you use them in the first place.

2. I stumbled upon http://stackshare.io the other day, I can't vouch for it but seemed nice to have a quick overview of what languages / framework / services are used around.

Re: Ask HN: What are the best web tools to build basic web apps as of October 2016?

#40

Post by Lazare »

The issue with your question, I think, is over the exact meaning of the words "best", "basic", "web apps", and "popular".

By many measures the best and most popular stack would be mysql, php, html, css, and maybe a little jquery sprinkled on top. It powers an enormous amount of the web, it allows very rapid development, and it's about as cool and hip among the hacker news crowd as a cod liver oil enema, and with good reason!

Of course, you can improve it, but you need to figure out what metric you're looking to improve it on. If you rule out PHP or jquery or whatever, then other answers start to look like the most popular.

> Seems like React frontend

React has a lot of buzz, and it widely used for new projects trying to build web apps with heavy client-side functionality. Of course, there's simply an enormous amount of Backbone, Angular 1, or random jQuery client-side apps out there, plus an even more enormous amount "traditional" webapps with minimal client-side functionality (like hacker news). You have to define your search quite narrowly to make React look like the most popular tech.

> perhaps Vue

In the last couple of weeks Vue has probably got more buzz in terms of people talking about it on HN and /r/javascript than React, yes. From a certain point of view that makes it more popular than React; from basically all other points of views it's much, much less popular. Then again, why do you care about popularity? The wisdom of crowds is probably least useful when judging hype-driven popularity contests.

> and Node being the popular backend?

For small hobby projects among people who mostly know JS and have no particular reason to choose anything else? Yes. And low barriers to entry mean it's used in a large number of projects.

On the other hand, in many ways it is an objectively inferior backend. And in others it's objectively excellent. It really depends what matters to you.

> Is there a site that keeps track of [...] how their popularity progresses?

Depends how you want to measure that. You can use google trends, or compare github stars, or npm downloads, or the number of topics posted about it on /r/javascript, and get different answers.

Realistically though...

...none of it matters. Any vaguely functional stack is good enough; the odds of your project failing because you picked Rails instead of Django, or Mysql instead of Postgres, or Coffeescript instead of Typescript is nil. What does matter is that you pick a vaguely functional stack and start writing code.

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