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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?

#261

Post by zem »

kolanos wrote: post #219
graboid wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 yo…

there's also justpy, uses vue and is closer to liveview in that it generates all the frontend code for you. https://justpy.io/

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

#262

Post by edflsafoiewq »

toastercat wrote: post #251
da39a3ee wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can I ask a concrete question: say someone wants to render a table with data coming via an Ajax call to a JSON API. How should they do that with the tools you're suggesting? Use the native JS DOM API to synthesize table rows? (Just in case tone of voice doesn't come across, if that's the solution great, I'm not implicitly criticizing it in advance).

Yes, use Fetch API to retrieve the resources, and pass the resulting data to a function that uses the DOM APIs to create the table element + children. If you're not attaching event handlers to the elements, and if the data is properly sanitized, you can also use a combination of `innerHTML` + HTML written in template strings to dynamically create the markup. Often people will see this and say "that doesn't scale!" We…

Why doesn't that scale? What would the optimizations be?

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

#263

Post by woojoo666 »

wwweston wrote: post #257
danenania wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Once your UI reaches a certain level of complexity, the benefits of various tools begin to outweigh the cost. What's that certain level of complexity? I have some heuristics I might use, but what I've noticed is that even discussion about where these product behavior thresholds are seems to be rare. And "polish" and "silky smooth" don't seem like features that come automatically with any of the top frameworks eithe…

But the earlier comment was saying to avoid NPM/Next/React because of the challenges that arise when you want to eject and add complexity. However, not using NPM/Next/React also comes with challenges when you want to add complexity.

In my mind, the best advice for beginners is to just follow the mainstream. You'll get the best tutorials, best community support, easiest tooling, and least fragmentation. First time using a computer? Mac or Windows. First time programming? Javascript. Just want to do simple web dev? NPM and React. After you've got the basics down you can start exploring the niche stuff like Linux or Rust or Htmx.

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

#264

Post by woojoo666 »

jacquesc wrote: post #234
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.

I personally love how wild west the javascript world is. I don't think any of the tools listed in the thread are the same, so it would be hard to consolidate all of them. The only reason why there's all these different libraries is because people have different preferences, and want libraries/frameworks that fit their preferences.

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

#266

Post by imcoconut »

Not drag and drop but for a 100% python solution h2o wave is pretty cool. It has a focus on data-based dashboards but can be used to pretty easily create very good looking frontends for all sorts of applications. And you never have to leave python (whether that's a pro or a con is up for debate :))

https://wave.h2o.ai/docs/getting-started

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

#267

Post by marc_io »

foxbee wrote: post #210

Budibase 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

Thanks for recommending this!

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

#268

Post by artificialLimbs »

tarsinge wrote: post #113
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.

Have any good recommendations on resources for learning vanilla js events?

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

#269

Post by artificialLimbs »

edflsafoiewq wrote: post #262
toastercat wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, use Fetch API to retrieve the resources, and pass the resulting data to a function that uses the DOM APIs to create the table element + children. If you're not attaching event handlers to the elements, and if the data is properly sanitized, you can also use a combination of `innerHTML` + HTML written in template strings to dynamically create the markup. Often people will see this and say "that doesn't scale!" We…

Why doesn't that scale? What would the optimizations be?

Don't know if this is directly related but the last time I fetched 9,000 elements to a select list, my browser went HRNGHHHH (on an M1 Macbook Pro). (No, 9,000 elements in a select list was not intentional.)

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

#270

Post by plaguepilled »

wackget wrote: post #220
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…

Since when did frontend require building or packaging? In fact, since when did ANY web development require those things?

Why is that bad?
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