Django running on Zappa ( https://github.com/Miserlou/Zappa )
Thanks, this looks awesome. I didn't know django apps could run on lambda.
Ask HN: What's your favorite way of getting a web app up quickly in 2018?
51–60 of 569 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite way of getting a web app up quickly in 2018?
#52Quickly? Firebase + React. Seriously, don’t overlook this combo. Auth just works. Hosting built in, no backend or database server to maintain. No API, just subscribe to a collection right from the view. It just works (and is easily swapped for the real deal if you need it). I made a guide/boilerplate to show you how (includes auth, CRUD, full text search, stripe subscriptions): http://getfirefly.org/
Too expensive to be worth it. I'm totally fine with outsourcing stuff that is difficult and third parties can do better, but in this case the amount of stuff you're playing egregious "cloud" pricing for is too much. Just spend a handful of days learning one of the open source stacks and you'll be set for life. It's totally worth it assuming you'll be making more than 1 app ever.
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite way of getting a web app up quickly in 2018?
#53Frontend:- 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.
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite way of getting a web app up quickly in 2018?
#54Quickly? Firebase + React. Seriously, don’t overlook this combo. Auth just works. Hosting built in, no backend or database server to maintain. No API, just subscribe to a collection right from the view. It just works (and is easily swapped for the real deal if you need it). I made a guide/boilerplate to show you how (includes auth, CRUD, full text search, stripe subscriptions): http://getfirefly.org/
I was gonna say the same thing. It’s cheap/nearly free if it’s just a little side project or low traffic thing. And a joy of a stack to work in.
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite way of getting a web app up quickly in 2018?
#55The quickest thing to develop in is normally what you know. I find django the most productive web framework for things that might take off (for purely static sites I use Hugo and serve the site from S3, and deploy it using cloudformation - a great combo that lets me bring up a landing page in an hour or so).
It sounds like deployment is what you want to simplify. While there is extra overhead in learning to use docker, deployment is one of the major issues it solves. I spent a day or two learning docker and docker compose, and now I have a local dev environment I can work in, and I'll be able to deploy to a host quite simply. Makefiles are an excellent, simple companion to docker, so it's also worth learning them.
The big benefit of this is that you abstract your code from how to run it. So today you might like django, tomorrow ruby/language du jour, but all of that would still be built as a docker container which you'd be able to deploy to the same host with minor modifications.
Also, to set up user accounts, create storage buckets, etc check out terraform. The language it uses, HCL, is a trainwreck if you need conditionals, but apart from that it works well and is simple (too simple, that's the trouble). So a combination of:
* whatever web framework you're productive with
* built into a docker container
* with makefiles to ease administrative tasks
* terraform to configure a cloud backend
is a very powerful combination. But yeah, more stuff to learn. At least this approach means you can swap out the web framework for any other language and nothing else really needs to change.
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite way of getting a web app up quickly in 2018?
#56Quickly? Firebase + React. Seriously, don’t overlook this combo. Auth just works. Hosting built in, no backend or database server to maintain. No API, just subscribe to a collection right from the view. It just works (and is easily swapped for the real deal if you need it). I made a guide/boilerplate to show you how (includes auth, CRUD, full text search, stripe subscriptions): http://getfirefly.org/
Too expensive to be worth it. I'm totally fine with outsourcing stuff that is difficult and third parties can do better, but in this case the amount of stuff you're playing egregious "cloud" pricing for is too much. Just spend a handful of days learning one of the open source stacks and you'll be set for life. It's totally worth it assuming you'll be making more than 1 app ever.
Guess it depends on what you consider expensive.
For me, time I’m writing unnecessary code or learning libraries I don’t already know is time I’m not spending thinking about the product. I’m a designer who just wants to ship.
I am open to suggestions though. What would you recommend for, say, auth instead? I’ve tried rails, Django, node/mongo, etc; even hosting a small db on compose.io comes with a chunky base fee, and I still have to do way too much work for user accounts/search/APIs/ORM. There’s a reason Firebase is popular with the yoof.
Change my mind though!
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite way of getting a web app up quickly in 2018?
#57I have trouble understanding where all this demand for webapps come from. As a browser of the web, the only webapps I use are Google's email, maps, and docs. What are all these webapps for and why doesn't HTML (maybe with a touch of javascript) suffice?
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite way of getting a web app up quickly in 2018?
#58Google app engine is my go to for web apps that need to be used in production at a small scale while I'm still evolving the functionality. What you prototype transfers into prod surprisingly well. The best part is I don't really have to worry about security - I just setup one of the default available authentication types and define access control in the routes in app.yaml. You don't have to be worried a hacking group will somehow subvert your instance if you miss applying a security update or mess up firewalls etc. If it's an internal app and your company is using Google Apps for business, you can even restrict access to people logged in to the company domain very easily.
The persistence layer is a bit problematic at very small scale (think hobby projects) but if you are willing to spin up a cloud SQL instance which wouldn't be an issue for paid projects, you get an excellent secure auto managed environment.
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite way of getting a web app up quickly in 2018?
#59Here's my template:
Backend in Go, hosted on Gitlab with CI to build it and create a docker image (also hosted at Gitlab).
Server is a plain Debian server hosted on Digital Ocean, with some light configuration with Ansible. A single docker-compose.yml brings up the application along with any service dependencies. Generally I use nginx-proxy with its letsencrypt companion so I can multiplex several docker web services and do SSL termination, all from within the docker-compose file.
Frontend in angular, react, or react native.
This is easy, automated, cheap, and not too exotic. I can host multiple things on a single server if I want, but easily splice them off to their own server later.
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite way of getting a web app up quickly in 2018?
#60Firebase and Angular hosted in GCP.