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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

#111

Post by iainmerrick »

ravenstine wrote: post #106
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 have to disagree with the Typescript part. Granted, it's not a bad suggestion, and there's a lot that's good about TS, but this isn't what I would consider a good place for it for a few reasons. TS, in my experience, has limited benefit when it comes to building a UI, and frontend JS is heavily married to UI programming. For guaranteeing UI functionality, writing years is a better use of one's time. What's more imp…

don't try to make TS work within code that is rendering stuff. Major frameworks put in lots of effort to support TS in the view layer and, with some exceptions, it usually comes with caveats

I’m really not sure what problems you have in mind here. I’ve found TS to be really useful with very few caveats.

The biggest problem you’re likely to hit in TS is when things subtly lose their strong typing accidentally -- for example, you need to use some API that works with untyped JSON blobs. But the you’re no worse off than if you were just using plain JS in the first place.

TS is especially great when you’re using libraries with good type annotations -- your IDE can give you useful live typechecking and autocompletion, even if your own code is in JS!

In React code, TS is really good because you can statically check your prop types. There is a little bit of a learning curve to doing that both correctly and tersely, but I think it’s more than worth the effort.

As the OP specifically said they wanted strong typing, TS seems like an obvious choice over vanilla JS. I suppose you could consider other things like Flow or Reason, but TS is the most widely-used by far.

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

#112

Post by ggregoire »

Can't go wrong with TypeScript + React. You can use ViteJS to bootstrap your project and build an optimized version for production. VSCode for a good TypeScript developer experience. Recommend to check out React Router and React Query if you go with React.

I personally still use vanilla CSS instead of the many other alternatives. I keep 1 CSS file per page/component (e.g. directory "Home" > index.tsx + index.css) and add a class at the root of my page/component (e.g. ) and then prefix every rule in this directory with this class (e.g. .home .something-inside-this-page). It keeps everything easily manageable and avoids CSS conflicts. Check out grid (vertical and horizontal layout) and flex (vertical or horizontal layout) if you are not familiar with these "modern" CSS features, they make everything simpler.

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

#113

Post by r0b05 »

zkirill wrote: post #55
r0b05 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate on some of your challenges please? I find it quite straight forward to use once you overcome the somewhat steep learning curve.

Sure, the following challenges come to mind: * Must maintain a deep understanding of RxJS, which is its own beast. Angular team sometimes uses it in "creative" ways that change between versions in creative ways. * Must not go off reservation (or do) where the Angular code is committed but not covered by documentation (because reasons). Template variables (hack an ngIf into an ngVar) come to mind, as well as how not s…

While I do agree with you, I must admit that some of these reasons could be subjective. That being said, Angular has its share of issues. However, I find the overall developer experience to be good and I usually find the code to be well organized in projects.

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

#114

Post by eagsalazar2 »

IMO you really have no choice but to use React because of React Native. Also, since you are somewhat new to this domain, you want to stick with the pack. Doing so will give you access to limitless 3rd party tools, libraries, etc and community expertise.

There might be solutions for just web that are better in some ways, but React isn't a bad choice. Given your parameters I'd optimize entirely for the factors mentioned above + dev velocity (Svelt's performance for example, rarely actually matters compared to community, ecosystem, react native, etc that React provides).

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

#115

Post by r0b05 »

thepra wrote: post #101

Blazor WebAssembly might be your pick, there's a starting template, write the front-end in c# and everything else in HTML and CSS as usual. It's such a breeze developing even complex webapps with it like my project collanon.app

So I checked out your project and the initial load is a bit slow. It's storing 26.1 MB of data so maybe that's why. Is it bringing the .NET CLR to the client?

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

#116

Post by eagsalazar2 »

franciscop wrote: post #86

> "building a text-annotation based app" I'm going to assume that you are talking about a desktop-based webapp that is also responsive, and not a native app. I have 10+ years of experience doing front-end, with probably over a dozen React packages self-published in npm, and also tried making a rich text editor ~6 years back[1]. I actually recommend starting with no framework at all (please read on). Creating a rich t…

Might make sense to just start with an existing rich text editor (with a friendly license) that you fork. You'll have your own needs but a large part of any editor is common to every other editor. Or maybe you could just spend a few days reviewing the source of existing editors as inspiration. Seems nuts to just go for it yourself especially since OP is saying they aren't super experienced in TS FE.

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

#117

Post by nawgz »

I am a React guy, but I can only see React or Angular meeting your needs

- Both are well-established, with lots of guides. Angular is much more "batteries included" and opinionated though - Both have good TS support, although React's might be slightly better I think Angular closed the gap sufficiently - Both have the most tooling - Both are the only likely candidates for "10 years maintenance" - I don't see why you'd want to do a truly native app but if Cordova doesn't work for your needs I guess React Native is a plus

Good luck

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

#118

Post by eagsalazar2 »

Just want to comment that I strongly disagree with all the commenters recommending no framework at all. If you want to make badass modern software, you need to invest in learning a framework that will help you do that. React has a learning curve and there are gotchas if you don't take the time to internalize a solid mental model of how it works (reading docs, watching lots of youtube videos over lunch, shooting yourself in the foot many times, etc) - but in the end it is insane the number of problems it solves for you compared to just writing stuff from scratch. I was a FE dev in 2009, I remember the before-times, and I remember backbone, Dojo, etc that were all hot garbage. The expressive power of React (and other modern frameworks) and velocity that is possible is insane compared to writing everything with just js.

* Also note, this isn't just about react vs Vue (for example). You'll have to make like 20 tooling choices here.

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

#119

Post by bfung »

Just pick a framework and make it work.

It sounds like you should spend the bulk of your time instead on figuring out how the text annotation portion will work - the framework will be secondary or even tertiary to being able to annotate the text and saving and retrieving the annotations.

Copy a lot from the other websites, ex: medium.com does this annotation, yeah? (side question, why not blog on medium and leverage the annotations there?)

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