i just use bootstrap and jquery. no compilation or building. they have served me well for years
Ask HN: What's is your go to toolset for simple front end development?
201–210 of 295 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's is your go to toolset for simple front end development?
#202Re: Ask HN: What's is your go to toolset for simple front end development?
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been using htmx since the intercooler days, but I'm of the opinion that just using Next.js and treating React like simple HTML is much easier for starters. Or Alpine, but not htmx. Learning all those attributes (30, not counting the HTML headers and the JS API and the CSS classes, and events like htmx:historyCacheMissError) is not as simple as some in HN make it out to be. Just look at the most basic example in…
Unfortunately, "easier" does not always equal "simpler". Next.js/CRA is "easier" because it hides a lot of the complexity away from you. In my opinion, ignoring how it all works under the hood and just blindly accepting tools/clis because "it works" sets you up for confusion down the road. I've met several JS developers who don't know that JSX gets transformed to JavaScript function calls after a build step -- they j…
Ha! I've met web developers that didn't know that you could do form posts without a JSON API
Re: Ask HN: What's is your go to toolset for simple front end development?
#204I just read that you didn't want to troubleshoot html, css and js, so my goto toolkit for simple UIs might not fit your bill, but hear me out :) At work, when I do internal tools, they are usually well received. They also pass just below the threshold of having their looks be judged. They're not ugly, because they're almost not there. Very plain HTML: HEAD+TITLE, H1, H2, UL, OL, A, IMG, INPUT, BR, TABLE, P Javascript…
There's a ton of very simple "minimalist" or "classless" or "markdown" [0] CSS files that you can apply to plain HTML to get modest good looks versus browser default styles these days. No changes to your markup, just use that raw HTML you are already comfortable with and LINK tag in a single CSS file.
This seems like a very good list with lots of handy easy to compare preview screenshots: https://github.com/dbohdan/classless-css
[0] From that idea that sometimes you just want to take a Markdown document's boring raw HTML output straight out of the processor without any other templating in between.
Re: Ask HN: What's is your go to toolset for simple front end development?
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
How stable is it? I've been screwed over twice by Angular, RXJS, etc. Every month we had to redo most of our work as the community kept deciding on new directions of correctness.
Check the second link above. There are frameworks for this pattern in most languages, many with many years of effort into them. I can personally recommend Vaadin.
Re: Ask HN: What's is your go to toolset for simple front end development?
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ignore any recommendation telling you to blanket ignore technologies without reason
Point taken; I admit I wrote that as a sort of frustration and reaction to the abundance of comments telling a newb at front-end developer to just take the deep dive and start installing a bunch of NPM packages / CLI tools. In my opinion, those tools hide amazing layers of complexity that become a problem as soon as you need to eject. I think any beginner at front-end development should realistically start by getting…
I think it just depends what you want to build. Once your UI reaches a certain level of complexity, the benefits of various tools begin to outweigh the cost.
If you know you're going to end up at that point because your designs include a high level of interactivity, you might as well use tools that will support your needs from the beginning--either that or revise the designs to be less ambitious.
Often newbies have a vision of what they want to build that matches the complexity/polish of established products--they're building Uber for X or Instagram for Y and so they want that same silky smooth UX. To achieve that, they are going to need a lot of packages and tools. The solution in that case isn't necessarily to convince them to build the whole thing in vanilla html/css/js instead, but to level with them about their expectations being unrealistic for where they're at.
Re: Ask HN: What's is your go to toolset for simple front end development?
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah... I'm about as far to the other side of this as you can get. It really looks like the x-html attribute you're complaining about is just using plain old javascript. It takes a statement that resolves to a string, and renders that. The statement they provided happens to be pretty terrible for docs (I would have just used the built in fetch api, instead of the axios networking library - https://github.com/axios/ax…
Maybe that's enough internet for you today? No one is "fucking" making you do anything. Pick the tooling you like, ignore the ones you don't like.
These frontend tooling threads devolve quickly.
Re: Ask HN: What's is your go to toolset for simple front end development?
#208Man, given all the comments suggesting frameworks that will require you to do html/css/js it seems like no one has really read your post.
For your use case I would look at AppSmith (https://github.com/appsmithorg/appsmith) or ToolJet (https://github.com/ToolJet/ToolJet).
These are full-stack low-code frameworks, but it's easy to use them to do just the frontend and connect to a backend API you implement yourself separately.
Edit: forgot to mention that these support drag&drop for building user interfaces :)
Re: Ask HN: What's is your go to toolset for simple front end development?
#209I 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…
I was a huge fan of Knockout for many years. Durandal was neat at the time, too, as a very simple "SPA framework" on top of just Knockout.
I find it a bit unfortunate that Knockout 3 seems to be showing its age at this point and is maybe not something I'd recommend in 2022. I think you can almost do more, easily and handier, with Vanilla ES2020+ than Knockout.
Though I certainly wouldn't recommend against Knockout either today. It's one of the few toolkits of that age that is still seeing somewhat active security maintenance, at least. There's also rumors that there may still be a production-ready "Knockout 4" in the pipeline one day. I'm still somewhat curious to see Knockout further modernized. (Search for "TKO.js" to see a preview. Allegedly, some groups are using TKO in Production already today, though it is under-documented and "unfinished".)
Re: Ask HN: What's is your go to toolset for simple front end development?
#210Budibase is perfect for this use case. It is open source and super simple to build an app with. It's used at Apple, Google, Space X and other incredible orgs (power of open source)
Budibase.com