Ask HN: What's your favorite way of getting a web app up quickly in 2018? • Hacker News Board

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

#121

Post by jchw » Sun, Jun 03, 2018, 5:29 AM UTC

dyeje wrote: post #114

chuckdries wrote: post #104

I'm surprised nobody is talking about Express for the back end. Maybe it's because I hail from the front end world, but I'm already so comfortable in javascript I'm faster in it than if I had to learn anything else. For the front end, I like Vue because it's just react with less boilerplate.

It blows my mind that there still isn't a polished ORM for the node.js / Express ecosystem.

Precisely this. I came from the Django world to try starting a Node.js project, and was absolutely blown away by how immature ORMs and even database libraries felt. In Python, you have SQLalchemy and Django ORM, both of which are fantastic and make ample use of the language. But for JavaScript, it felt like an uphill battle, especially if you want to do anything fancy.

Of course you don't _need_ an ORM or at least you definitely don't need one as full-blown as Django ORM. But I didn't even feel comfortable using any of the solutions I saw that were supposedly the 'best.' And yet, when I went and evaluated the solutions, I do agree they were the best - I just never felt like they were mature enough to really use yet. As far as not using an ORM goes, certainly this is doable, but at the end of the day if you don't want to hardcode a bunch of SQL queries and statements you probably are going to need to write code that will begin to look awfully like ORM code for basic operations...

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

#122

Post by appdrag » Sun, Jun 03, 2018, 5:33 AM UTC

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

#123

Post by jb1991 » Sun, Jun 03, 2018, 5:35 AM UTC

Full-stack Clojure with Clojurescript front-end is about the fastest workflow I’ve ever used. The front-end part in particular with Reagent (a Clojurescript React library) is a very quick workflow compared to all front-end alternatives. There are perhaps more valid options for server, but even still, having the same language in both browser and server is very convenient both for reduction in cognitive dissonance and automatic transfer of language-specific data structures back and forth.

Highly recommend.

I should add that on both server and in browser your code base will usually be a lot smaller than most other languages, which greatly speeds workflow as well. As an example I once ported an Elm project to Clojurescript and it was a 4x reduction in lines.

Using Heroku to just git push the project works well too. Deploys in seconds.

If your project becomes more, it all scales well. Clojure is quite fast compared to Ruby or Python, and Heroku scales with the click of a button. You won’t have to port to a more performant language or host if you suddenly get popular.

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

#124

Post by connorelsea » Sun, Jun 03, 2018, 5:40 AM UTC

dyeje wrote: post #114

chuckdries wrote: post #104

I'm surprised nobody is talking about Express for the back end. Maybe it's because I hail from the front end world, but I'm already so comfortable in javascript I'm faster in it than if I had to learn anything else. For the front end, I like Vue because it's just react with less boilerplate.

It blows my mind that there still isn't a polished ORM for the node.js / Express ecosystem.

There are multiple. Sequelize is the best and I've used it in a few projects

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

#125

Post by nreilly » Sun, Jun 03, 2018, 5:43 AM UTC

I find Linode/whatever with dokku and Django to be pretty quick and consistent. I have a dokku instance internally for testing, and do production deploys in the same way. It uses heroku buildpacks via herokuish which makes deploying anything straight forward.

  Create Ubuntu VM (with applicable config (ssh keys only, automatic security updates, turn off cruft)
  Install dokku
  Install PostgreSQL plugin for dokku
  Install letsencrypt plugin for dokku
  Create app in dokku
  Add remote in git repository locally
  Add buildpack triggering things/stuff to let Django run in this environment (gunicorn, collectstatic stuff, etc)
  Git push dokku

Edit: formatting

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

#126

Post by jypepin » Sun, Jun 03, 2018, 5:44 AM UTC

The fastest way to get a web app running, for free is Rails + github + Heroku, imo.

It's very fast to scaffold a new app, with diverse options you'd want (react/vue/other stuff). Host it on github, create a heroku app and push it.

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

#127

Post by hardwaresofton » Sun, Jun 03, 2018, 5:44 AM UTC

dyeje wrote: post #114

chuckdries wrote: post #104

I'm surprised nobody is talking about Express for the back end. Maybe it's because I hail from the front end world, but I'm already so comfortable in javascript I'm faster in it than if I had to learn anything else. For the front end, I like Vue because it's just react with less boilerplate.

It blows my mind that there still isn't a polished ORM for the node.js / Express ecosystem.

Typeorm has been fantastic for me: https://github.com/typeorm/typeorm

It strikes just the right balance between the data modeling approach and query building for me.

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

#128

Post by nikhildaga » Sun, Jun 03, 2018, 5:45 AM UTC

We use React + React Native + Nodejs + GraphQL to build web and mobile apps at https://ideatostartup.org

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

#129

Post by jypepin » Sun, Jun 03, 2018, 5:46 AM UTC

tty7 wrote: post #67

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…

I looked into rails in some detail about a year ago, and I think it's the only pretty good solution for this I've come across—but there's a steep up front cost in learning/setup etc. (or so it seems).

The community is so big, and so focused on conventions over configurations, usually googling "rails " returns a LOT of links to stack overflows and blogs that clearly explains everything. Rails offer so much syntactic sugar/plug and play gem systems that usually things are setup in fewer lines of code than anywhere else.

The downside is that it's easy to build something while barely having any idea how it works, but if you want something up quickly (or if you already know how things work) then it's perfect.

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

#130

Post by meesterdude » Sun, Jun 03, 2018, 5:46 AM UTC

It's still totally rails.

I mean... I can start a new project, create some models/tables and relations between them, and deploy it to heroku with admin login and decent interface and file upload... in half an hour?

and... this little project I create in half an hour, can be scaled up to handle tens of thousands of requests a second. Or wrapped with a native navigation and served up to mobile/desktop users, or integrate with any number of apis and services. And I can put it down for 5 years, come back and (almost)instantly know how to continue working on it; development in rails often has a certain obviousness to it. You spend time solving the interesting problems instead of the boring ones.

But the real kicker, is doing it in rails is enjoyable and effective; one person can deliver similar software that takes multiple teams many months to do in megacorps.

I've also had a number of managers hiring for phoenix/python/java stacks tell me they have a hard time finding the sort of developers they like working with outside of rails. I found that surprising - but rails does have a culture of effectiveness and happiness that other stacks do not share.

Anyway, If you have an idea and want to get something working but that can also carry you beyond prototype; Rails is a great choice. A complete development framework, well documented, great community, strong history, designed for enjoyment and effectiveness; that checks all the boxes for me.