Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ Vs http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/
Ugh, way to overdo it... #444 is WAY too low contrast. If black is too dark, I'll reduce the contrast of my monitor myself, so can y'all please stop trying to force me to squint to decipher your gray-on-gray oh-so-beautiful but unreadable text?
Ask HN: What's is your go to toolset for simple front end development?
241–250 of 295 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's is your go to toolset for simple front end development?
#242Man, 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!
Indeed. OP should have asked for "easy" or "simple to use" because "simple" means something else entirely.
Assembly language is simple.
Re: Ask HN: What's is your go to toolset for simple front end development?
#243Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I've met several JS developers who don't know that JSX gets transformed to JavaScript function calls after a build step -- they just assume it's part of how browsers work at this point. And that is mindblowing to me. I believe you, and I've also met some like you described who came to our interviews indeed, but it's more like the failure of their mentors. I've also met back-end engineers, with a lot of experience,…
failure of their mentors? To an early point, but beyond that everyone who considers themselves a professional needs to sit down with a book or three and understand stuff. 'mentors' is a small excuse IMO.
I'm currently mentoring some junior devs and perhaps I was thinking about them when answering. You are absolutely correct on that.
Re: Ask HN: What's is your go to toolset for simple front end development?
#244Re: Ask HN: What's is your go to toolset for simple front end development?
#245May 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.
Well, I never used the word "simple", mostly intentionally. Except to describe next's backend API stuff, which is pretty simple (just a node server at the end of the day).
Is react/next complex? Sure. Everything is far more complex than it initially seems, HTML is complex, React is even more complex if for no other reason than it builds on top of HTML.
But websites are also complex. I've found that I can very quickly reach a website complexity where I feel more productive in React than bare HTML; very quickly indeed. And next is really, mostly, just nothing on top of that; its dev tooling, yeah you sometimes have to think about where the state is (server/client) and where the rendering is happen (if you use next export: its just always on the client, done). Experientially, these are small problems; and would potentially be intractable for a website that has attained the complexity to need to solve them, built on bare HTML.
There are a few new techs that I want to try, to see if they can capture the simplicity of HTML, with the good parts of react. Vue is definitely one, but I've been following Astro for a bit and it also seems interesting; granting the ability to just go basic HTML, or bridge into React, Svelte, anything.
Re: Ask HN: What's is your go to toolset for simple front end development?
#246Elm. 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.
secound, espeicaly together with elm street for generating code from Haskell
Re: Ask HN: What's is your go to toolset for simple front end development?
#247Bootstrap is 100% the answer. Pulling in everything from a CDN is the easiest route. Bootswatch is also great if you want a little more styling. (Free bootstrap themes) Bootstrap is great because it is so ubiquitous. They have page templates you can copy to get the page layout you want and then there are tons of bootstrap examples you can just copy and paste.
Yeah, going to the Bootstrap examples, “view page source”, and seeing how the elements are put together is what made simple front-ends for internal tools so easy for me. Lots of examples and minimal pages to start from.
Some team members have actually been suspicious that I was adding in React or something since if you use the right components it can look really interactive.
Especially on the corporate VPN with just Flask doing a little bit of templating the latency is very low. A button redirecting to a new page is almost as fast as something all in the client side.
Re: Ask HN: What's is your go to toolset for simple front end development?
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Well, I never used the word "simple", mostly intentionally. Except to describe next's backend API stuff, which is pretty simple (just a node server at the end of the day). Is react/next complex? Sure. Everything is far more complex than it initially seems, HTML is complex, React is even more complex if for no other reason than it builds on top of HTML. But websites are also complex. I've found that I can very quickly…
Sure, but the ask was explicitly "simple"
Re: Ask HN: What's is your go to toolset for simple front end development?
#249+1 for Svelte/SvelteKit. Svelte's DX feels like you are just using JS, CSS, and HTML - but you get all the new hottness of the other framework packages as you need it.
Re: Ask HN: What's is your go to toolset for simple front end development?
#250Ignore 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 nee…
The Play CDN is the funky script I was referring to. It's not plain compiled CSS, it's a rather large (~100kb) JavaScript file that dynamically adds Tailwind classes to your document as you use them. It's also only intended for development purposes. I would recommend the CLI to OP over that, but my point was that it's largely unneeded for his use-case and more likely to cause confusion and more toolchain bloat for what are one-man homelab hobby projects.