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Ask HN: What's is your go to toolset for simple front end development?

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Re: Ask HN: What's is your go to toolset for simple front end development?

#61

Post by jlengrand »

It's not purely drag and drop, but not complex either

I personally go for lit[1] and sometimes typescript, and that's it. Typically use open-wc[2] to have a starting template under a minute.

Then I use any of the front-end libraries that add bells and whistles. Vaadin coming on top [3]

I'm a backender, I don't have time to, nor want to learn the specificities of a framework. And I don't want my users to have to pay the cost of many dependencies that I'm not using the full power of.

Add firebase or supabase with netlify for deployment, and I'm done.

[1]http://lit.dev/ [2]https://open-wc.org/ [3]https://vaadin.com/docs/latest/components

Re: Ask HN: What's is your go to toolset for simple front end development?

#62

Post by heeton »

jonnycat wrote: post #30

If you need any kind of interactivity on the frontend, but are more comfortable with the backend, I would suggest looking at Phoenix LiveView [0] or a similar server-rendered HTML technology for your language of your choice [1]. In short, these solutions take JavaScript out of the mix entirely and basically let you deal with a single logical "app", rather than a separate frontend & backend. [0] https://github.com/pho…

Seconding this. I've been using LiveView in production for ~18 months now, on a couple of projects.

Hugely simplifies the overall stack. Combine with TailwindCSS, TailwindUI.com, and you have some very powerful tooling at a low development cost.

Re: Ask HN: What's is your go to toolset for simple front end development?

#63

Post by anakaine »

idiocrat wrote: post #53

Wisej is just god-sent. It has all I need, and lets me focus on business logic, rather than plumbing. It is all one simple layer, no front-end/back-end.

This actually looks alright. I got burned with .Net Razor pages in a previous professional project, so am a little wary of .net based setups. The advertising material looks good tho.

Re: Ask HN: What's is your go to toolset for simple front end development?

#65

Post by anonyfox »

jonnycat wrote: post #30

If you need any kind of interactivity on the frontend, but are more comfortable with the backend, I would suggest looking at Phoenix LiveView [0] or a similar server-rendered HTML technology for your language of your choice [1]. In short, these solutions take JavaScript out of the mix entirely and basically let you deal with a single logical "app", rather than a separate frontend & backend. [0] https://github.com/pho…

After having learned & used all the major frontend frameworks (starting from jquery, backbone, ... react, svelte) I am now firmly in the camp of LiveView. No more "REST APIs"/fetch calls, SSR by default, no javascript alltogether, very simple programming model once you "get" it.

Re: Ask HN: What's is your go to toolset for simple front end development?

#66

Post by vivegi »

I started off like you on the backend development. When I had to build small webapps, I looked at the various frameworks and then settled on KnockoutJS. KnockoutJS is a very small and simple JS library. This is several years ago and at that time I didn't even know Javascript. The reason I say that is because even for a JS newbie, the KnockoutJS library was simple to use. (I read somewhere that MS Azure used KnockoutJS for their frontend dashboards in their earlier version. Not sure if they still do.)

If you are comfortable with plain HTML + CSS + Javascript, adding KnockoutJS will give you a minimal app building capability that you will find useful for several usecases.

You get to manage your application's data model in javascript on the client side and the UI can be bound to your datamodel (bidirectionally) without having to manage it yourself. That is more than sufficient for many usecases.

If you don't want to be fiddling around with CSS too much, you can use something like Bootstrap or Material Design's CSS templates to get some decent looking UI (without getting lost in CSS minutiae).

For your development workflow, start without any bundler (like WebPack or Parcel) first. Once, you have your application working, you can then introduce it as a final step.

Re: Ask HN: What's is your go to toolset for simple front end development?

#68

Post by cardosof »

lysecret wrote: post #67

I am using Retool for that. Pretty happy. It is true drag and drop. Looks decent and there has been nothing I couldn't build with it.

Cool, can you build production stuff / products or is it focused on personal projects?

Re: Ask HN: What's is your go to toolset for simple front end development?

#69

Post by sandreas »

sveltekit [1], orbit.js [2], JsonApiDotNet [3] and postgrest [4], additionally docker-compose, sometimes typeorm[5] + express. Good for prototyping and small home projects :-) Production readiness is questionable for the first 2 mentions...

:-)

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

[2]: https://orbitjs.com/

[3]: https://www.jsonapi.net/

[4]: https://postgrest.org/en/stable/

[5]: https://typeorm.io/

Re: Ask HN: What's is your go to toolset for simple front end development?

#70

Post by tbran »

he_is_legend wrote: post #3

https://tailwindui.com/ - lots of pre-made templates using tailwind css. Some are free, but the more advanced ones require payment.

Also see DaisyUI [0], a free/open source component library for Tailwind.

[0]: https://daisyui.com/

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