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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?

#231

Post by likortera »

larrik wrote: post #225
015a wrote: post #221

May be unpopular, but: nextjs + react (+ bringing in typescript later if it starts feeling like types would be valuable). 1) React/jsx is legitimately nice for templating. Lets say I have a list of ten things I need to display; I know these things at build-time, its not dynamic like from an API or whatever. These ten things are reasonably complex; div+spans+borders+etc. React is all about components; it makes that ea…

React is so far from "simple" it's not funny, then to throw nextjs in there too... For instance, I find vuejs to be way simpler as a non-frontend dev, and that's way overkill for what I'm interpreting the OP to want.

I like react, and next. I use it at work and it pays my bills. But I 100% agree with you, the complexity is mind blowing. And I'm pretty scared of all the upcoming server components, etc...

It is a very powerful tool for sure, but it is so misused in places where it is not needed.

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

#232

Post by ctw »

y-c-o-m-b wrote: post #228

I've been doing this for so long that I've gained years of experience in React, Angular, and Vue. You said simple front-end development and there's nothing easier than Vue, hands down. The syntax is so easy and segregated perfectly; no JSX wild-west ugliness or fucking with a minefield of observable and subscriber pipe functions. It's easy to get started, encourages clean code, and very readable. It boggles my mind h…

I’ve used React, Vue, Knockout, and just plain vanilla JS, and Vue is what I reach for now for personal projects. React is great if it’s already set up but I don’t want to waste any time with a build system for personal projects. With Vue I just add a link to a CDN, copy paste the hello world code in and I’m off to the races.

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

#233

Post by willswire »

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…

I recently stood up my own website[1] and decided to write my own CSS, HTML, and JS in VS Code with the Live Server extension. It was exactly what I needed! It’s as if we’ve already been given all the tools we need for a nice, simple website.

[1] https://willswire.com/

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

#234

Post by jacquesc »

amne wrote: post #146

This thread is amazing. Every other comment mentions a new tool I've never heard of. And I thought building APIs is hard. Ignorance is bliss

Yeah, even as a frontend dev myself... half of these I haven't heard of. Frontend dev tools desperately needs some consolidation. Everyone seems to be trying to solve the exact same problems over and over again.

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

#235

Post by czottmann »

azangru wrote: post #115
ihateolives wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :-)

There's Deno Fresh now (https://fresh.deno.dev/) which looks like a pretty interesting new web framework so far.

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

#236

Post by das_keyboard »

gwbas1c wrote: post #107

> I'm quite firmly in back end development. What languages / platforms are you familiar with? For example, if you do a lot of C#, you could look at Blazor. Server-side Blazor isn't 100% simple; but if you're already doing C#, it's very easy to learn. (In-browser Blazor compilers C# to WASM, Server-side Blazor sends all mouse clicks over a websocket and gets back partial HTML updates. It (server-side) has a bit of lat…

You are probably thinking of Vaadin[1] for Java web apps.

[1]https://vaadin.com/flow

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

#237

Post by ok_dad »

juicypt wrote: post #208

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…

Now this is what the OP was looking for, and it so happens that I'm going to look into these too! Thanks!

Quick question because I have no idea what I'm doing: is there any integration in either of those that you know of for one or more 3rd party auth system(s)? I don't want to write my own auth!

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

#238

Post by Beltalowda »

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…

One of the issues I had with KnockoutJS is that it's pretty easy to leak memory and quite easy to use a lot of CPU. Maybe we were "using KnockoutJS wrong" (entirely possible!), but we had several independent teams working on different products and they all suffered from these problems. Eventually we switched most things to VueJS and the performance difference was remarkable.

I'm not a dedicated front-end dev, although I did write plenty of KnockoutJS code (I was less involved with the VueJS rewrites; I mostly moved to work on backend code and other things), but overall I'd be a bit wary of KnockoutJS. I'm sure there is a way to avoid these issues, but I was never quite able to figure out how.

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

#240

Post by 1-more »

cies wrote: post #77

Elm. If there is a back-end API with a spec (GraphQL or OpenAPIv3) you can generate an Elm client for that which makes API calls type-safe and thus very robust.

Cosigned. And if the backend is yet to be written then put the whole thing on Lamdera.
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