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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?

#211

Man, 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…

Have you tried budibase

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

#212
post #211

Man, 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…

Have you tried budibase

That looks pretty cool, I'll have to check it out :)

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

#214
post #140
post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> mastered it in 2 weeks as a backend engineer "mastered"

Why not? React is a simple concept / library. It‘s the ecosystem around it that is complex and hard to keep up with.

You can't be a master in the abstract. I think it's reasonable to say that a React master needs to be familiar with a great deal of the React ecosystem.

Otherwise you're diluting the meaning of "master".

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

#215

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…

> Ignore any recommendation of React, TypeScript, Vite, or Tailwind.

I mostly agree with the first three (with caveats about how interactive/app like you want to the result to be), but I totally disagree about Tailwind, the only exception being if all you want to do is throw up some

s and tags and have it look better than the default.

If you're going to do much layout at all, you're gonna need CSS. If you already need CSS, Tailwind isn't much more. It's basically just css properties expressed as classes in your html. If you know the CSS already, the Tailwind equivalent is in most cases guessable. If you don't know the CSS you need yet, you'll mostly have to learn it anyway unless you can copy/paste somebody's existing layout and have it be good enough for you. And again, once you know the CSS you need, the equivalent tailwind is easy. The benefit of Tailwind is that it puts markers/boundaries over the raw CSS that are easier to reason about, and having it right in the html (IMHO) makes it a lot simpler to work with.

You've mentioned in other comment:

> I wrote that in reaction to the comments telling a front-end newb to start installing a bunch of NPM packages and CLI tools. I don't think OP should be "afraid" of Tailwind, but for someone new to front-end development, I would not recommend you install a CLI tool or some funky CDN script just to style your HTML. Basscss is a good alternative since it's small and ships as a single plain CSS file.

I agree with what you've said, but again excepting Tailwind. A "compiled" version of TW can be used (very easily) from CDN[1] so there's no need to mess with npm or cli tools.

[1]: https://tailwindcss.com/docs/installation/play-cdn

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

#216
post #163

React.js is the gateway drug for you to dig into frontend development. I myself mastered it in 2 weeks as a backend engineer. There's no simple way, there's only the first step. Good luck.

What tutorial would you recommend to learn React fast, for someone who already knows JS well?

The official documentation.

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

#217
Since you like Python and want a turnkey React/Python integration with a Django backend, check out https://www.reactivated.io.

It's not drag and drop, but abstracts away all tooling and let's just get to just writing your code. Either in React or in Django templates.

Eventually, if you have any dynamic behavior, you're going to end up rebuilding a lot of what React does for you.

Full disclosure: I'm the creator.

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

#219

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…

This is really cool and makes me want to learn Elixir. Staying in one language for frontend and backend is just so appealing. To my knowledge, the other option to achieve that would be having something like Blazor WASM or Rust Yew that compiles to WebAssembly to have a client-side app a la React/Vue/Svelte. I wonder which of these approaches will end up be more prevalent in the future. To me it seems like compiling s…

I came across something that is somewhere in the middle. Maybe a happy medium? It's a Python library called IDOM [0]. Best way I can explain it is that it is server-side bindings for React, where state and diffs are passed back and forth for you via web sockets. You implement your components in Python with a React-like API and IDOM builds the equivalent React components for you on the client-side and then wires up your server-side state handlers. It is also web framework agnostic, works with all the most popular ASGI web frameworks in Python.

Admittedly it is still a bit raw. But seemed like a really interesting concept when I was looking for LV equivalents.

[0]: https://idom-docs.herokuapp.com/docs/index.html

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

#220

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…

Since when did frontend require building or packaging?

In fact, since when did ANY web development require those things?

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