WeDeploy is less well known but offers a great (and growing) near-SaaS for building and deploying fully-featured web apps quickly. Surprising utility and my personal choice. I recommend checking it out and giving it a shot. Plus, the team there is responsive and always ready to listen to and meet user needs. Anyone else tried WeDeploy?
Ask HN: What's your favorite way of getting a web app up quickly in 2018?
451–460 of 569 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite way of getting a web app up quickly in 2018?
#452Not having a server at all is the easiest. I run my front ends on S3 / CloudFront. Backend is run on Lambdas, with state stored in DynamoDB/SimpleDB (can't wait for serverless Aurora though!). create-react-app and aws-amplify gets you really far in a hurry. I then normally use react-redux, @redux-offline/redux-offline, react-router-dom, and flow-bin. Examples: - https://gitlab.com/kabo/synchronize-swatches - https://…
as a frontend dev new to this stuff - how do you keep your lambdas secure? literally anyone can see your secrets?
I'm gonna go through your code, thanks for sharing, just wanted to ask in case you have a big picture insight about how serverless auth/security is best done. this stuff freaks me out because i know nothing about it.
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite way of getting a web app up quickly in 2018?
#453Reading this thread is making me want to write a blog post titled "Technology Fragmentation is Making Us Stupid and Wrecking Our Careers".
Every hour a developer spends learning a new language/stack/framework hotness is an hour that could be better spent studying something real, like mathematics, CS fundamentals, or UI design.
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite way of getting a web app up quickly in 2018?
#454After reading most of the comments im really suprised to see folks still using vm servers and managing the stack themselves. Seems like high enough overhead. I know cost is on peoples minds so why not serverless? Haven't seen anyone mention aws lambda or gcp cloud functions. You get a massive free tier , like 2 million requests and free db... Anyone doing this?
yeah i feel like im so disconnected. there's literally one comment about aws lambdas, and a couple about firebase but pple still go "oh its so expensive" when in reality their stuff will almost never bust the free tier
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite way of getting a web app up quickly in 2018?
#455Docker, Django, Caddy, Postgres, Digital Ocean.
Absolutely LOVE Django cookiecutter.
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite way of getting a web app up quickly in 2018?
#456Reading this thread is making me want to write a blog post titled "Technology Fragmentation is Making Us Stupid and Wrecking Our Careers". Every hour a developer spends learning a new language/stack/framework hotness is an hour that could be better spent studying something real, like mathematics, CS fundamentals, or UI design.
I used to chase the latest framework/language/hype machine and realized I was spending way too much time just playing catch up (this was especially the case with JavaScript/Coffeescript/Livescript/TypeScript...).
Now I’ve firmly put myself into focusing on one or two languages and learning them well, even as the “newest kid on the block” comes around that claims to want to replace every back-end language under the sun. It’s allowed me to focus on things like design patterns, integration development, and learning about infrastructure and good architecture principles, which I feel have added a lot more value than listing fifteen different “hot” skills on my resumé or whatever. I’m also a lot happier not having constant development information overload.
I get that keeping up with trends is a good thing to do, but sometimes you need to just ignore the chaos going on and plant yourself in one ecosystem for awhile just to take a breather.
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite way of getting a web app up quickly in 2018?
#457It tends to depend on what I'm setting up but these days I've shifted from Heroku onto services like now.sh and Netlify (not to discount Heroku as a viable option here) when I just need to get something online, quick and dirty. There's less commitment which is ideal because you're not going to know the full requirements for your app until you've begun to flesh it out more, so you can buy yourself some time to figure that out as you go along (e.g. what happens if you go for microservices?).
That said, never mind 2018...there are a whole load of joys (and horrors) that fresh devs these days won't ever really understand the same way because nothing like Docker or Heroku existed even just a decade ago.
You know, paying £3 a month for a shared hosting plan with 100MB disk space, and PHP4, phpmysql, Apache at your disposal.
Downloading FileZilla and deploying by dragging and dropping the new folder into the client, making sure to overwrite.
Debugging by using the same client to edit files and add logging in production.
Having to write htaccess rewrite rules for 'pretty' URLs that any developer today will think is just default behaviour for a web framework.
Having to use SVN and CVS, if using version control at all...
It's not like you can't still do any of this, it's just that dragging `index.php` into an FTP client isn't the default advice for deploying a simple site any more. For better and for worse.
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite way of getting a web app up quickly in 2018?
#458Earlier quoted context omitted.
And what about zero downtime deploy (upgrading the app binary and updating the database schema)? It's difficult to do without some kind of reverse proxy and without a database server.
How often is that really required? OP asked for a quick deploy, for most apps it's enough to put the db into read-only mode and then update the schema. Upgrading the app binary is as simple as replacing it on the file system and then restarting the service.
The more often we deploy with CI/CD, the more we need zero downtime deploy. Putting the DB in read-only mode is not that simple, because the app needs to be able to work in a degraded read-only mode.
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite way of getting a web app up quickly in 2018?
#459Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite way of getting a web app up quickly in 2018?
#460Heroku and Heroku Addons are freely available at my company, so it’s the preferred deployment target. I work on a developer productivity team so being able to stamp out apps fast is one of our most important requirements. Heroku has given us a ton of flexibility, and with that we’ve been able to become very opinionated and standardize on one stack. 12 factor design patterns (and the opinions of Django-cookiecutter) a…
I'll chime in on the pro-CI discussion and leave the language discussions to "what's the best front end lang" posts.
I just got done revamping my decade-old PHP experience to full OO, and really upped productivity with the Slim framework to build a REST API for our app. I'm using Salesforce platform as the database backend, which is slow but I encapsulate all the business logic there. That's all cool, but, it didn't seem like I was hitting the mainstream of productivity.
Long story short, I'm on the Google/TypeScript/Material/Node bandwagon now. The dev environment is easy, and there's a wide choice of Node deployment platforms. I believe we can get the kind of deployment productivity we want with using a CI pipeline based on Github or Bitbucket that squirts commits to Google App Engine.