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Ask HN: What's is your go to toolset for simple front end development?

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Re: Ask HN: What's is your go to toolset for simple front end development?

#71

Post by anakaine »

vivegi wrote: post #66

I started off like you on the backend development. When I had to build small webapps, I looked at the various frameworks and then settled on KnockoutJS. KnockoutJS is a very small and simple JS library. This is several years ago and at that time I didn't even know Javascript. The reason I say that is because even for a JS newbie, the KnockoutJS library was simple to use. (I read somewhere that MS Azure used KnockoutJ…

Great advice. Thank you. What have you been doing to help with page layouts, if anything?

Re: Ask HN: What's is your go to toolset for simple front end development?

#72

Post by lysecret »

cardosof wrote: post #68
lysecret wrote: post #67

I am using Retool for that. Pretty happy. It is true drag and drop. Looks decent and there has been nothing I couldn't build with it.

Cool, can you build production stuff / products or is it focused on personal projects?

People use it for production. It is thought for internal use but you can also make it external.

So we have used it for about 1.5 years for semi critical stuff.

To be honest we had some reliability issue and one where actually wrong requests have been send to the DB. (They fixed it quickly but that left a scar).

So I wouldn't feel comfortable using it for super critical things. But it is absolutely perfect for building MVPs.

Re: Ask HN: What's is your go to toolset for simple front end development?

#73

Post by mattlondon »

graboid wrote: post #44

Preact [0] + htm [1] Why? Preact is small, fast, and reasonably easy to use. But the main selling point for me was that, together with htm, I don't need any build system a la webpack. No node_modules folder. I just have to load one script (preact + htm bundled), define my components in plain javascript files and import them. Bliss for me. [0] https://preactjs.com/ [1] https://github.com/developit/htm Edit: Just read…

Ah no NPM! Vanilla JS with no build step. This is very interesting. Thanks.

Re: Ask HN: What's is your go to toolset for simple front end development?

#74

Post by mattlondon »

vonadz wrote: post #22
dusted wrote: post #4

I just read that you didn't want to troubleshoot html, css and js, so my goto toolkit for simple UIs might not fit your bill, but hear me out :) At work, when I do internal tools, they are usually well received. They also pass just below the threshold of having their looks be judged. They're not ugly, because they're almost not there. Very plain HTML: HEAD+TITLE, H1, H2, UL, OL, A, IMG, INPUT, BR, TABLE, P Javascript…

I recently took a similar approach for a couple of simple websites ( https://abyteofcoding.com/survey/ and https://crosspromote.io ), and found that surprisingly people don't really care that much. It's still very annoying to deal with responsive stuff (changing design based on screen size) though.

Your site is broken for crosspromote - things are too wide for the viewport leading to things being clipped and so unreadable (at least on mobile).

Re: Ask HN: What's is your go to toolset for simple front end development?

#76

Post by anyfactor »

- Jinja templating as standalone or in Flask.

- Classless minimal CSS framework to make pages pretty without using css

- htmx

Try to avoid doing state management. If you have to do it, use a frontend framework at that point.

https://github.com/dbohdan/classless-css

Re: Ask HN: What's is your go to toolset for simple front end development?

#79

Post by twohaibei »

i recommend taking a boilerplate that is based on fast compiler (esbuild for example) and has tailwind set up. then add alpinejs for basic interactions. I think this stack has lowest barrier of entry for backend Devs, while having still a lot of room for growth. if you don't know tailwind, skip that part, it doesn't matter much, you can use whatever bootstrap-like library with great results.

Re: Ask HN: What's is your go to toolset for simple front end development?

#80

Post by fzumstein »

I am the developer of xlwings, so this is heavily biased. Anyhow, ever since I’ve added support for Google Sheets, I am building all internal tools with it. No HTML/JS/CSS required whatsoever and everybody knows how to interact with a spreadsheet UI. There are a few sample projects on GitHub, e.g., https://github.com/xlwings/xlwings-googlesheets-pandas-plots (they use FastAPI, but it’s trivial to adapt for Flask). On top, Google Sheets let you easily authorize the user on the backend, so you can give certain users read-only access to a database, as an example.
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