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Ask HN: Help me pick a front-end framework

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Re: Ask HN: Help me pick a front-end framework

#21

Post by lucas_codes »

chaos_emergent wrote: post #12

Sounds like you're in a similar place as me a year ago. Here's a list of tools that I'd use: - TypeScript for language. Gives you an insanely expressive type system that is a step up from Python duck typing (which you seem familiar with after perusing your GH). - React for framework. Frontend experts will shit on it for being non-performant or having a poor UX, but the community is massive and you'll have a ton of su…

I'd agree with all these, but if I understood correctly OP wants to annotate static text rather than edit.

OP this is an interesting and rather niche area, you will want to be making use of the selection API[0] and figuring out a good way to make it reactive to integrate with react and your data model.

[0]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Selection

Re: Ask HN: Help me pick a front-end framework

#25

Post by ajjenkins »

I agree with the other comments suggesting React. I actually typically recommend just plain HTML and CSS for most projects. But it sounds like you’re building something with a lot of interactivity, so something like React (or Vue or Svelte) is going to make your life a lot easier.

I also agree with other comments that you should postpone worrying about iOS/Android apps for now. Targeting those platforms adds a lot of complexity and will slow you down. So you should avoid them unless your app really only makes sense as a native mobile app.

If down the road you do decide that you want native mobile apps, I recommend using React Native with Expo. Transitioning from React to React Native is relatively easy (from a concepts perspective). But React Native doesn’t use HTML or real CSS (although it’s heavily inspired by it), so you will need to rewrite a lot of your code and change all of your dependencies over to React Native-compatible versions. With React Native, you can have a single code base that targets web, iOS and Android so you don’t need to maintain multiple versions of your code.

If you don’t like React Native for some reason (e.g., it’s made by Meta), you can also look into Flutter which is made by Google.

Re: Ask HN: Help me pick a front-end framework

#26

Post by eric4smith »

Html + CSS + Javascript in 2022 is mostly what you need.

Unless your job is going to require a framework, it’s really not necessary.

Maybe I’m the old curmudgeon who is more concerned about putting out something that works and get customers/revenue quickly, than messing around with the latest Javascript toolchain to ensure it builds in Docker.

You csn get a ton done with Javascript and Tailwind or DaisyUI. In fact almost 90% of what you need.

And with the advent of new backend frameworks like Liveview that patch the dom, I believe things like Angular, React, Vue are on the dying list.

Re: Ask HN: Help me pick a front-end framework

#27

Post by Frotag »

> Because of limited time, and low confidence in UX design decisions, I would often follow the path of least resistance and the end product would be heavily influenced by the tools I used to build it.

Angular with the Angular Material components library would be very "batteries-included". You don't have to decide how you store state, what testing framework to use, etc. Angular provides sane defaults for most things. And it also ticks your TypeScript requirement.

> Relatedly, I expect to get the UX design horribly horribly wrong and start from scratch at least once. I also suck at making things look pretty and also don't find this problem very rewardinging to think or read about.

With angular material, you'll get pre-built and pre-styled navigation menus, form inputs, etc. Wiring them up to your TypeScript code will be a breeze but it'll be tough to customize them if you're going for somewhat unique / unusual behavior or styling. And occasionally you'll need something commonplace like a time picker and the library won't have that.

> I don't think I'll want a native desktop app but an iOS/Android version could make sense.

The simplest route to putting your app in the app store / play store is called a Progressive Web App (PWA). For which you basically need a config json and some icons. The gotcha is that PWAs have virtually zero access to native features.

> I don't really have the discipline for manual testing. Luckily I also find it satisfying to over-invest in test automation. I don't really know how this is done in frontend land but good tooling would be a big plus.

Angular uses Jasmine by default for unit tests. You can test both the business logic and UI interactions this way, but in my experience mocking out components is annoying and a fuckton of maintenance. I usually stick with testing the logic or clumps of un-mocked components. There's also support for end-to-end tests using Protractor, but I'm not super familiar with it.

> I'm happy to sacrifice one or more of the other requirements in favour of tools that are likely to be maintained 10 years from now.

Angular will probably be around 10 years from now, but I doubt keeping the version / other dependency versions up-to-date will be painless. Some things are just kinda deprecated / replaced for lame reasons (but you'll have notice of these changes waaay in advance).

Re: Ask HN: Help me pick a front-end framework

#28

Post by zkirill »

Based on your requirements and resources I would recommend using plain simple JavaScript over any framework. The time you would spend learning any framework or build system would be better spent iterating on your core experience and experimenting with things that come out-of-the-box on modern web browsers. Frameworks inevitably drag you into their ecosystem where everyone marches at a certain pace. While there are benefits to this, I think it would be a distraction for you. Furthermore, there are many arcane JavaScript libraries that you may find useful down the road, and it is much easier to drag-and-drop them into your project with HTML "" compared to fighting with module bundler du jour.

Re: Ask HN: Help me pick a front-end framework

#29

Post by snowstormsun »

I would suggest you to take a look at https://svelte.dev/. It's fast, has TypeScript support and is very easy to learn. I've been using React for many years, but after trying out Svelte, I am coming to the conclusion that Svelte is much more fun and more powerful. For example, it supports a global store out of the box. On the other side, it's not as mature as other frameworks, probably. Also, in my experience with React Hooks you tend to get into a very complex dependency and rendering logic and the code can be very hard to understand after many hooks were added (but that's another topic).

Re: Ask HN: Help me pick a front-end framework

#30

Post by mattlondon »

Frotag wrote: post #27

> Because of limited time, and low confidence in UX design decisions, I would often follow the path of least resistance and the end product would be heavily influenced by the tools I used to build it. Angular with the Angular Material components library would be very "batteries-included". You don't have to decide how you store state, what testing framework to use, etc. Angular provides sane defaults for most things.…

+1 to angular being "batteries included". If you need to ask what framework to use, pick angular as all of the hard choices have already been made.

You don't have to make any more choices after picking angular - you are all set and everything not only works together perfectly complete with extensive documentation for the whole thing, but you also get a professionally maintained UI framework designed to work with it.

Compare with react which is just the first of many subsequent and continual choices you will need to keep on making as sub-frameworks come and go and need to be replaced as you maintain your app e.g. major security issue in foo 1.1 but you can't upgrade as it has a dependency on boo 1.2 that has not been updated so you need to switch to quux 0.9a but that changes how forms are handled so you need to refactor your apps routing, and that breaks your test framework etc, then someone deletes the leftpad repo and none of your dependencies work anymore anyway etc (oh and by the way your NPM install is out of date too so upgrade that first). Then factor in fighting with NPM & node, dealing with separate documentation for different sub-frameworks, your effort and sanity from trying to integrate them etc. I am perplexed as to why anyone would pick react for anything apart from the most trivial of UIs - it is a nightmare.

Angular will be around for a long time - it is used extensively in enterprise environments and Google.are throwing SWEs at it even if the vocal cool kids are using react or Vue or whatever.

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