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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?

#331

Post by mooreds »

mercer wrote: post #299
strken wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Phoenix loses my vote for being quick to set up for a web application, because last time I used it, it didn't have a good authentication framework that worked with JSON APIs. What took ten minutes to set up using Devise in Rails took me two days using Coherence in Phoenix. Unless that's changed since I last tried Phoenix, I'd be hesitant to use it in the same niche as Rails.

I'm a huge fan of Phoenix, in part because it addresses the main issue I had with Rails (too much magic). But I do agree that losing the huge ecosystem of gems is a significant downside. Hopefully that'll change over time, because other than that, Phoenix really feels like the next iteration of Rails to me.

That's my biggest gripe with Phoenix--so much good stuff can't be used. I understand that sometimes moving on the next thing requires this, but man, it isn't just Rails that has tremendous value when creating a web app. The entire ecosystem has so much good "drop in"/"near drop in" functionality.

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

#332

Post by pacifika »

lol768 wrote: post #300
kristopolous wrote: post #168

Vanilla php + html5up + sqlite3. Everyone else here is trying to be stylish and fancy. Your customers don't care what language it's in or whether the code is beautiful. No cutting edge incomplete frameworks, convoluted tooling, piles of inaccurate documentation to read, inexplicable cryptic error messages with a bunch of incorrect solutions on stack overflow, or other incompetently over engineered bullshit. Just go a…

>No cutting edge incomplete frameworks So what, you rewrite a templating engine every time you want to make an application that outputs user data? Or are you reliant on making damn sure you always call htmlentities every time you echo something to prevent XSS? Are you sure you've not slipped up anywhere? What about CSRF? Do you write your own filtering mechanism every time you make a web app to check for the existenc…

The other side of the coin is whether you do a full security audit of every framework and dependency graph before you use it? When you write your own code you know there is nothing hidden.

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

#333

Post by mooreds »

xstartup wrote: post #292
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…

It's hard for us to train new devs in Ruby and Rails. We've found Go to be superior in deployment + speed up on new developers.

Curious about specific difficulties with Rails?

And what web frameworks do you use with Go?

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

#334

Post by GlennS »

nicostouch wrote: post #149
victor106 wrote: post #53

Frontend:- React/Vue/Angular Backend:- Spring Boot with Kotlin I must say I am so impressed with what Pivotal did with Spring Boot. It’s amazing.

It's so not fast to develop with though. I used to use it exclusively for years just cos that's what I knew. Switching to Rails now because Rails blows it out the water for speed of development. I still have a lot of love for Spring Boot just because of the power/flexibility and how incredible it is as a framework and marvel of engineering. But starting a spring boot app vs. starting a rails app is night and day in t…

As someone who really, really hated previous versions of Spring, and had vowed never to work with it again, is Spring Boot different enough to be worth a look?

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

#335

Post by mooreds »

naikrovek wrote: post #180
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…

Well, here's one reason: the amount of time saved when standing up a webapp on Rails is absolutely insignificant compared to the life of that webapp in all situations where that webapp is anything serious. Not to say that Rails apps aren't serious! I'm just saying that the time saved in standing up a webapp with Rails vs., say, Java, is miniscule compared to the develooment life of that application, overall. In short…

Ah, that's an interesting perspective. Having written and supported websites in both Java and Ruby (plus some other languages), I think that your perspective is valid. Long term costs are worth considering. However, sometimes you can take a long term hit in order to deliver quickly.

> compared to the life of that webapp in all situations where that webapp is anything serious.

Actually there is a situation where the short term life of the webapp matters far more than the long term. That's when you are not sure if there is going to be a long term. This could be a startup, a spike to explore a new business model, or even just a prototype of an internal app.

In all those cases, delivering something that has value in a short time outweighs the value of something that might be more supportable/extensible in the long term.

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

#336

Post by murukesh_s »

biztos wrote: post #290
superasn wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PHP is like the Javascript of backend. Hate it all you want but there is nothing better to get shit done esp if you're a small team or working solo. Also it is super flexible too (much like JavaScript and babel) as in you can write strict OOP code or you can write plain php code inside Html in static files.

Isn't NodeJS the Javascript of backend?

+1 for NodeJS, seriously no offence to PHP folks, but Nodejs or Python is not much different from PHP in terms of developer productivity.

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

#337

Post by noir_lord »

crag wrote: post #232
kristopolous wrote: post #168

Vanilla php + html5up + sqlite3. Everyone else here is trying to be stylish and fancy. Your customers don't care what language it's in or whether the code is beautiful. No cutting edge incomplete frameworks, convoluted tooling, piles of inaccurate documentation to read, inexplicable cryptic error messages with a bunch of incorrect solutions on stack overflow, or other incompetently over engineered bullshit. Just go a…

Since you listed PHP - take a lot at Laravel ( https://laravel.com/ ) Like Rails, you can get a a site/app up in minutes. .

Symfony 4 can be spun up as fast as Laravel 5 and (this is my opinion) Symfony has all the benefits of Laravel with a better ORM (if you want it) and they have never broken backwards compatability in my experience.

Throw in the utterly fantastic documentation (that is both more detailed, thorough and better organised) and I'm not sure why Laravel took off the way it did.

I used Laravel for 3 years at a previous job (from 3 to 4 to 5) and I still think Symfony is the better basis for anything that isn't a relatively small application.

Also Symfony components are genuinely de-coupled, documented on how to use them stand alone and useful for that (I gradually brought them in on an inherited project with few issues).

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

#338

Post by rishav_sharan »

cpursley wrote: post #327
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…

> no way anyone is beating a Rails dev in setting one up I disagree. Elixir/Phoenix is as simple as Ruby/Rails and an order of magnitude more performant out of the box. Especially if you already know Ruby and the basics of functional programming. Plus, unlike Rails, you probably won't need separate servers for background jobs, websockets and caching.

And if the next order of magnitude of performance is needed, there's always Crystal

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

#339

Post by dempseye »

figgis wrote: post #76
PostOnce wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you aware that Flask exists for Python? I might take that bet about no one being able to go quicker than a Rails dev.

Agreed. Flask or Aiohttp + templating engine of choice + flask-login or aiohttp-security is extremely fast and simple.

You left out persistence, which is the most annoying bit of setting up a Flask project, imo.

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

#340

Post by sbhn »

If I’m doing static html, even with minimal javascript perhaps even making an Ajax call client side, I am happy to use github pages or gitlab pages. See here a 2 min video setting up a static html website with gitlab pages. https://youtu.be/kvZ9teaA5zI
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