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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?

#111

Post by danielvaughn »

anakaine wrote: post #71
vivegi wrote: post #66

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 KnockoutJ…

Great advice. Thank you. What have you been doing to help with page layouts, if anything?

My own advice, on the other hand, is to use Tailwind. Tailwind is far more flexible than Bootstrap and it's super easy to understand. If you pair it with the Intellisense plugin, it's a total game changer. I've been writing CSS for over a decade and I'll never go back to normal CSS after trying it.

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

#113

Post by tarsinge »

toastercat wrote: post #90

Ignore any recommendation of React, TypeScript, Vite, or Tailwind. Here are some recommendations that don't require NPM/Node. Pick a "classless" CSS library from a site like CSSBed[1]. These are kind of like Bootstrap, except you don't need to write any CSS or apply any CSS classes in your HTML for them to work. No tooling necessary; just include a tag in your HTML document. If you'd like to try something similar to…

While Mithril is interesting unless you are resume-building I'd avoid anything React-like until you are a small team and just go Vanilla JS with events, it can go a long way if you are a solo dev, especially if you have a backend experience and can write clear and simple code.

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

#115

Post by azangru »

ihateolives wrote: post #108
azangru wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used Lit for web components, with no build steps. I loaded it from unpkg [0]; but there are probably more production-ready CDNs in existence. It worked pretty well, especially since CSS styles can also be encapsulated inside of the shadow DOM of the components. But for proper frontend projects, I would use typescript, and therefore a build pipeline. https://www.unpkg.com/browse/lit@2.2.7/index.js

I'm thinking of trying ts + deno at some point since deno has built-in ts support.

It won't help with the browser-side part of the story though :-)

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

#116

Post by rmbyrro »

toastercat wrote: post #90

Ignore any recommendation of React, TypeScript, Vite, or Tailwind. Here are some recommendations that don't require NPM/Node. Pick a "classless" CSS library from a site like CSSBed[1]. These are kind of like Bootstrap, except you don't need to write any CSS or apply any CSS classes in your HTML for them to work. No tooling necessary; just include a tag in your HTML document. If you'd like to try something similar to…

Best recommendations.

Just one thing: do a favor for your visitor's privacy and don't use a CDN, download the css/js packages and host them yourself.

> An easy way to try out Mithril.js is to include it from a CDN and follow this tutorial. [1]

[1] https://mithril.js.org/

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

#117

Post by rmbyrro »

Tade0 wrote: post #112

Check out: https://docs.lowdefy.com/introduction You need Node.js installed so that you have npx, but otherwise you just write your UI in yaml, because why the hell not?

Took a few seconds to load a purely text-based page on my browser, with several roundtrip requests.

I don't think this is a good toolset in terms of simplicity...

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

#118

Post by jeanlucas »

dbrueck wrote: post #110

https://svelte.dev/tutorial/basics - easy to get started with but really powerful for complex stuff too For layout, don't use any CSS framework, but instead refer to https://css-tricks.com/snippets/css/a-guide-to-flexbox/ often - every time I use some big CSS framework I end up fighting it at some point. https://vitejs.dev/ for packaging - I got really grumpy when frontend stuff started needing build and packaging to…

I don't consider Svelte a simple toolset because it can't be published statically

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

#120

Post by bluehatbrit »

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…

I'm in the same camp, I've slowly "regressed" backwards from overcomplicated SPA's back to server side rendering. When LiveView hit and I was already using Phoenix it was just perfect. It's a slight embelishment on top of multi-page server rendered pages which gives all the benefits I need and nothing more.

If I _really_ need something to be driven by the frontend like a transition then I'll use Alpine.js.

For CSS I tend to use tailwindcss / tailwindui because I know it well and it doens't need npm. If I didn't know tailwind I'd probably look at something like bootstrap or something I can build on top of with vanilla css.

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