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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?

#11

Post by DanHulton »

I built Nodewood: https://nodewood.com

I really enjoy NodeJS/Vue for web apps, but I got sick of having to connect together all the packages from scratch each time, set up ESLint, testing, database connections, write the user auth/management, all that common stuff. So instead, I put together a boilerplate with all my common practices and basic app features. I figure, it ultimately saves me time on all future web apps, and if other people want to build a similar style of app, spending a few hundred on a decent boilerplate is cheaper than hiring a freelancer to do it for it, or even doing it yourself, if you value your time at anything higher than minimum wage.

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

#12

Post by yawn »

Just to add some off-the-beaten-path solutions I've come across recently:

https://github.com/Bogdanp/koyo - Koyo: a web app toolkit written in Racket

https://github.com/yawaramin/re-web - ReWeb: a ReasonML/OCaml web framework

https://cons.io - Gerbil Scheme has an embedded web server that supports writing handlers for

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

#14

Post by b0afc375b5 »

nickthemagicman wrote: post #6
crazypython wrote: post #3

Semantic HTML, CSS, Vanilla JS, and JAMStack. Semantic: embed data directly in HTML. If I have a list of wines with categories, each wine's "class" attribute has a class for each category. HTML: can be generated by anything and consumed by anyone. Great SEO. CSS: These websites were all made with the same HTML, only CSS changing. http://www.csszengarden.com/ Let's imagine we have a checkbox, that when checked, should…

IS CSS really this well featured and expressive these days? I havent tinkered with it in years.

Yep, thank god for flexbox and grid layouts.

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

#15

Post by k__ »

I'm currently working with the AWS CDK and the more I used it, the more I have the feeling tools like that could be the next big thing.

It's melting the walls between cloud infrastructure and application code and the fact that it does IaC with the same language I use to program web apps (JS/TS) plays an important role here.

I think, it's not 100% there yet, but it's on a good way.

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

#16

Post by recursivedoubts »

mrwetsnow wrote: post #10
recursivedoubts wrote: post #5

I am working on two alternative tools for building web apps: https://htmx.org - uses HTML attributes and HTML-over-the-wire for AJAX/Web Socket/SSE interactions https://hyperscript.org - an experimental front end programming language derived from HyperTalk that is event-oriented and that removes the distinction between synchronous and asynchronous code. Both tools are HTML-oriented and are designed to be embedded dir…

"Locality of Behavior" is how everything started, when we used to embed PHP code into html. :)

yep

the idea wasn't wrong, but the level of expressivity wasn't there yet

trying to fix that

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

#17

Post by rbdone »

crazypython wrote: post #3

Semantic HTML, CSS, Vanilla JS, and JAMStack. Semantic: embed data directly in HTML. If I have a list of wines with categories, each wine's "class" attribute has a class for each category. HTML: can be generated by anything and consumed by anyone. Great SEO. CSS: These websites were all made with the same HTML, only CSS changing. http://www.csszengarden.com/ Let's imagine we have a checkbox, that when checked, should…

What’s old is new again Great example, btw!

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

#18

Post by news_hacker »

I'm really enjoying working with MDX (JSX & markdown hybrid). https://mdxjs.com/

I was able to quickly put together a blog with some pretty nice features (e.g. margin notes): https://pratik.is/writing/essays/media-as-food

Writing content in markdown while adding interactivity with JSX is pretty nifty.

If you click "Raw" here you can see how the blog post is just markdown with some custom JSX elements littered in, e.g. : https://github.com/pringshia/pratik.is/blob/master/pages/wri...

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

#19

Post by Leftium »

SvelteKit, Serverless, Backendless.com

SvelteKit[1] is a framework for SvelteJS (like Next.js is a framework for ReactJS). I've tried both Svelte and React. Svelte seems to be more elegant and lets me implement my ideas faster with less code. Svelte is very flexible; SvelteKit adds some opinions on how to do things like routing.

SvelteKit also embraces the serverless paradigm[2] (AKA JAMstack[3]). Although a node.js server is still an option, you can also have pages rendered in serverless functions or pre-rendered at build time. Even static pages can be "hydrated" on the client so they are not totally static. So this results in fine-grained SSR (server-side rendering) at the page level. The two main reasons for SSR are performance (especially on mobile devices) and SEO.

Backendless[4] is a VADP/MBaaS. This platform offers a lot of services, but the main one I'm looking at is authentication/identity. I was looking for an authentication service that supports anonymous guest login, social login, as well as traditional email/password login. The other contenders were Google Firebase (slow, and confusing sign in/sign up flow[5]) and AWS Cognito (too complicated/difficult to use). Auth0 was a contender, but they don't support guest logins.

[1]: https://kit.svelte.dev

[2]: https://www.serverless.com

[3]: https://jamstack.org

[4]: https://backendless.com

[5]: https://github.com/firebase/firebaseui-web/issues/665

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