Nitro is the server baked into nuxt 3. I feel like web server frameworks have all been circling around the same set of features for like 10 years though.
Ask HN: Is Express still "de-facto" for building Node back ends?
31–40 of 100 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is Express still "de-facto" for building Node back ends?
#32No - please check out Hono https://github.com/honojs/hono
Hono is the new hotness. It can run across , deno, bun, cf workers, etc etc it’s not locked to node
Re: Ask HN: Is Express still "de-facto" for building Node back ends?
#33I mean, it depends on who your asking. Express has effectively been abandoned. In 2023 many would recommend Fastify as a go-to.
Has it been abandoned or is it just done? It's still sitting at 29 million downloads a week, so while it doesn't get frequent updates I wouldn't call it abandoned unless there are major security flaws that are being left unaddressed.
Not every package needs to have multiple updates in a year.
Re: Ask HN: Is Express still "de-facto" for building Node back ends?
#34Follow-up question: Is there any backend framework which uses the fetch API. That is, where requests are standard Request objects (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Request) and where you send (or return, or yield) standard Response objects (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Response)?
I’m teaching a highschool kid web development and it would be very nice to be able to teach the same standard on the back end as we use on the front end.
Re: Ask HN: Is Express still "de-facto" for building Node back ends?
#35It'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"
Haven't the team been working on v5 for years?
Re: Ask HN: Is Express still "de-facto" for building Node back ends?
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Even being used to it (from other languages), it's super jarring in JavaScript because it's redundant. JS has other, better ways to achieve the same result, so it's generally a step down just to be more familiar for non js devs
Re: Ask HN: Is Express still "de-facto" for building Node back ends?
#37I 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.
We like fastify for structure, types, perf, and maintainer responsiveness. I can count how many bugs we have had.
The backwards incompatibility is frustrating as most of the major changes could have been done in non-breaking ways. That makes it harder to recommend for people who do software for work - it is par for the course of the economic waste that is the JS framework upgrade treadmill, which may seem normal, but isn't.
I'd still generally recommend something like Django (!) or, if you need to go thin, fastAPI, as more complete, stable, & open governance than many node frameworks. Frustrating as V8 is an amazing engine.
Re: Ask HN: Is Express still "de-facto" for building Node back ends?
#38I 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.
Is Express.js still even maintained? Does it still adds new features?
Also switched to Fastify. It has a great ecosystem and community. It's also easy to write custom plugins.
Re: Ask HN: Is Express still "de-facto" for building Node back ends?
#39If you're sure you want a traditional strictly-serverside backend, Fastify is like an improved Express. But your project's success might depend on going beyond a hasty sanity-check that presupposes app architecture. What's your front-end look like? For React, using a framework like Remix (or Next.js) that spans client and server runtimes, could make Fastify/Express potentially moot.
Re: Ask HN: Is Express still "de-facto" for building Node back ends?
#40Yes it is, Bun is promising but still in early stage. If you're looking for a battle-tested framework I would suggest Nest.js, which supports both Express and Fastify in a virtually transparent way.
I read, Elysia is the hot thing on Bun right now
Gonna try it in my next hackathon.