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

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201–210 of 333 posts

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

#201
For non-app websites, so in other words for "static websites", I have worked in the last 15 years with many technologies.

First j was in love with server side rendering. Mostly it was PHP in many flavors. For projects I had full control over I even built custo frameworks. Then I tried server side rendering in nodejs with frameworks such as react-server. I must say that the overheads were not worth in my experience.

I also tried client side rendering with js frameworks such as angular (v. >= 2) and react, but to be fully honest that was a not idea solution for "static websites".

Lately I've combined all these experiences and I've built my own static web site builder, YASSB (https://yassb-foss.github.io/). I've built it combining what felt tome like the best features of all the above. In short:

- websites are pre-rendered and served as static websites

- pages are composed with reusable components, these can be simple HTML components or can be rendered with js.

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

#203
post #15

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.

I spent a lot of time with CDK last year using Typescript. Very impressed with it and I have zero regrets after moving over our app's infrastructure to being deployed with it after 9 months in production. I felt like being forced to use typed IaC helped me understand AWS API's and services themselves better.

While I'm not a big fan of some decisions the team made when building the CDK (the whole class/context stuff feels very un-javascript-y), it was the first project where I appreciated TypeScript over JavaScript.

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

#204
I'm doing Fullstack with Angular + Spring Boot Kotlin.

I love writing the backend but the frontend part really seems overly complex.

In the end I'm just mirroring my data from the backend on the frontend, having to maintain two models, mapping the json to an object and then inputing that data into another component where it gets displayed. For example I tried to create a generic edit component but without reflexion it was a huge pain in the butt: https://github.com/tschuehly/DataRecovery/blob/f4003ddebbba7...

I would love to just have an html structure and then just having a template for a component filling it in the backend and sending it to the frontend.

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

#205

- Next.js (react) - Chakra-UI (for ui + ux) - Hasura (graphql + postgresql) - Express.js (for custom actions, event hooks etc) - Kafka for message brokers Previously, I was fullstack javascript developer using raw html with only express js and its renderer. Later I discovered ui and ux, react with dsl also graphql as data layer overwhelmed me. So I found simple stack for faster shipping. Learning curve is not that di…

Been using Next.js and Chakra. Big fan of Chakra, it's the best UI library I've used hands down.

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

#206
I made my own app. server with built in distributed JSON database that can hot-deploy directly from your PC to a cluster of servers async. = instantaneously.

This means I have 1 second turnaround from idea implemented to testable on a copy of live.

Other than that I am still on manual HTML, CSS and vanilla .js!

JavaSE for server and javascript for client.

HTTP Comet-stream over XHR/Fetch for real-time.

Single serving database salt SHA256 for security.

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

#207

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…

I've played with HTMX (and previously intercooler.js). Just wanted to say - everything you touch is awesome. Thanks for your efforts. I also like Alpine.js and Stimulus.js projects. They're trying to simplify the insanity of front-end development. Go + HTMX is super powers. It peels away the piles and piles of framework layers and still gets you 90% there. For the 10%, just use React/Angular/Vue.

thank you very much, that's awesome to hear

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

#208

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…

I'm really looking forward to Hyperscript growing more capabilities. I love that it's very natural-language-oriented. I'm really interested in frameworks like this that could make HTML website creation more accessible for regular people. Watching a friend try to build a website with SquareSpace I was thinking... for the amount of effort she put into learning SS's tools and quirks, she could almost have just learned H…

yep, the tool chain startup costs in front end development are very high unfortunately

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

#209

Just finished working on the first iteration of a website for my mom. I didn’t want to deal with a full classical CMS and maintain Databases and such, especially as my experience with wordpress, PHP and typo3 has faded a little bit. My mom’s website is basically a directory of old mansions in former eastern Prussia. Site is in German: https://gutshaeuser-ostpreussen.de Anyhow Stack chosen: Backend/CMS as a Service: h…

Regarding Prismic lockin: Have you checked whether the exported .zip contains the entire media library? Regarding SEO: If you (i) host the Cormorant Garamond font locally and inline its CSS, and (ii) use srcset to serve a smaller hero picture on mobile, you will probably achieve a 100/100 score in lighthouse.

Didn’t think someone actually looks at the page. Thank you!

Currently I am just saving away the page contents as a JSON when rendering the page. My mom has all media locally. TBH, I considered just crawling all the pages and media via the API/SDK with a scheduled job in CI. Maybe saving them in a git repo to get history for free or just uploading a zip every week to backblaze.

Thanks for the SEO tips. Will definitely look into hosting smaller images and the font, also need to add meta tags for descriptions, maybe some JSON LD and other shenanigans for Facebook, Twitter, etc. Had to focus on the mom-visible stuff first ;)

Also wanted to look into analytics with something privacy friendly like https://umami.is/

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

#210
post #34

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…

HyperScript is so cool. I’m seriously going to look at this after I was stuck in a pit of addEventListeners yesterday.

:) it's pretty cool, but also pretty alpha

happy to help you get started if you want to jump on the discord

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