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Ask HN: What novel tools are you using to write web sites/apps?

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Re: Ask HN: What novel tools are you using to write web sites/apps?

#61
I'm using a combination of Elixir, Hugo, a bit of Python and GitHub Pages for a personal site that hosts my poetry. I set up a simple hourly job in elixir to check Evernote for any new poems I've tagged with poetry:publish. If a new poem is detected, the elixir job downloads the text, runs it through a Python script to add it to the Hugo repo, regenerates the static html and pushes the updates to GitHub.

Overall I'm a huge fan of Elixir, it's incredibly reliable and easy to pick up for simple server tasks. Plus the scheduler is built into Beam, no need for any extra deps. My only complaint is needing to rely on extra python to convert the ENML to HTML, but that's a very niche library so not surprising that it doesn't exist in Elixir yet.

Re: Ask HN: What novel tools are you using to write web sites/apps?

#62
post #49

This partially might be more of a what's old is new again, but here's what I use: - 100% server side rendered - Progressively enhanced (fully works without JS, but having JS enabled makes it nicer) - In select places where I need SPA-like snappiness I use a ~100 line long DOM diffing algorithm (I request full HTML through AJAX and diff it into the current page; if the user has no JS enabled then the page just refresh…

No SQL database is the one thing I disagree with. What if you want to write a SQL query/report? Do you have transactions? As the app gets bigger you might want that.

> No SQL database is the one thing I disagree with.

I'm not saying this approach is a good idea in every case. There are many situations where I would use a proper database. It really depends on what kind of app you're building, what kind of queries you want to run, how big is your dataset, your failover and availability requirements, your programming language, etc.

In my case it was a great decision. The code is simple, and the data is convenient to access since it is already packed in native data structures. And it's really, really fast since all of the "queries" are basically LLVM-optimized machine code.

> What if you want to write a SQL query/report?

I just write a few lines of normal Rust code to do that. Sure, it's not as convenient. But I don't need to do that as often, so I don't care.

> Do you have transactions?

The concept of 'transaction' doesn't really make sense in this approach, since I'm directly modifying the data in memory, every change I make is atomic and can't fail, and I flush the data to the disk atomically as well.

Re: Ask HN: What novel tools are you using to write web sites/apps?

#64
I built GoodPlates [1] using Netlify [2] for rendering the HTML, JS, CSS. Instead of using vanilla CSS, I used TailwindCSS [3]. My backend consists of API Gateway [4], Lambda [5], and DynamoDB [6]. I also use CircleCI [7] for deploying my API Gateway / Lambda changes.

[1] https://findgoodplates.com/

[2] https://netlify.com/

[3] https://tailwindcss.com/

[4] https://aws.amazon.com/api-gateway/

[5] https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/

[6] https://aws.amazon.com/dynamodb/

[7] https://circleci.com/

Re: Ask HN: What novel tools are you using to write web sites/apps?

#66

This partially might be more of a what's old is new again, but here's what I use: - 100% server side rendered - Progressively enhanced (fully works without JS, but having JS enabled makes it nicer) - In select places where I need SPA-like snappiness I use a ~100 line long DOM diffing algorithm (I request full HTML through AJAX and diff it into the current page; if the user has no JS enabled then the page just refresh…

What are “native data structures”?

Normal structs, `Vec`s, `HashMap`s, `HashSet`s, etc. Basically whatever is natively available in Rust.

Re: Ask HN: What novel tools are you using to write web sites/apps?

#69
A shameless plug - but I'm attempting to build a kind of "deploy first and develop as you go" kind of system for this, inspired by the Smalltalk IDE and VM.

Link - https://github.com/imaginea/inai

Associated post - https://labs.imaginea.com/inai-rest-in-the-small/

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