Hi. As someone new to frontend, could anyone tell me how frontend for lightweight-but-very-functional sites like these (also hackernews) built? Do they use something like Next.js for server-side-rendering? Which frameworks would you recommend to build a social network, if one wanted to avoid Single Page frameworks like React and Vue?
Having built sites of similar levels of interactivity, we would have used some sort of server side framework with a template library (A custom PHP framework+Smarty, Spring Boot+Thymeleaf, Python+Django), without any front end frameworks at all. We would use jQuery a little, and later some Bootstrap. But these days vanilla JS would probably suffice for what we'd generally have used jQuery for. This is probably a bit o…
One could also reach for something like Preact if some components are too complicated for manual imperative updates. You can use it without a build step and only for some parts of your pages. For compatibility you can ship a server-rendered component that you then throw away if the client has JS enabled (although that would require you to implement it twice).