Ask HN: Web frameworks – which less popular frameworks are you using and why?

This is a self-plug, but I use the (commercial) framework that I wrote: Nodewood [1].

I really enjoy JavaScript, specifically the combination of Express on the back-end and Vue on the front-end, and I got tired of having to do so much setup every time I wanted to work on a new project. So I abstracted it out into its own thing and started adding fixes to all the other little things that bothered me about web development, like having to write validation & business logic on the front-end and back-end instead of being able to use shared code, having to manually migrate Stripe products, etc.

I've been working on adding a deploy solution based on Pulumi [2] in the last few days to finally finish out the 1.0 feature set, which will mark a pretty exciting milestone in a several years-long journey!

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[1] https://nodewood.com/

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

Is it pretty similar to Flask?

My org is heavily invested in Ember and it sucks. We're into it for purely historical purposes. It was chosen by devs 2 generations past. It's not a terrible framework conceptually, but being invested in anything niche or out of fashion is such a burden. No one knows how it works, can't hire for it, updates are rare, hard to find integrations. I would not venture outside the mainstream if you can't afford to take big risks.

Play Framework: Built on top of Akka, non-blocking architecture (offload any long-running work into Futures), mature codebase and APIs for Java and Scala. It's an opinionated framework where you'll write your code in a classical MVC style (define endpoints in a routes file which are then handled by controllers).

http4s: Focused on functional programming, more of a library than a framework. Doesn't define the architecture of your program as much as Play and can therefore be integrated into your project more easily if you want to add HTTP to an existing project.

I enjoy working with either of these two. Pick Play if you want a framework (contains everything to get going with HTTP but forces a certain architecture). Pick http4s if you want a library and/or more focus on functional programming.

Self-plug: I wrote this Node / TypeScript port of "clean architecture" to typed, functional JavaScript two years ago - and it's served me well on every production project ever since

https://github.com/jbreckmckye/node-typescript-architecture