Ask HN: Hunting for a Framework

Hello HN!

My primary background is in desktop development and my knowledge of web development is a little rusty by now. I know about Node.JS, Angular, React, Express and the like and have done a few small projects with these technologies. So far, I have implemented the below requirements for each project myself or copied them from previous projects. Now I am looking for a reasonable fullstack framework with the following requirements:

- A central definition of data schemas. I don't want to define my schema or validation twice, once in the frontend and once in the backend.

- Automatic generation of REST endpoints. I hate boilerplate code and don't want to reimplement Get/GetOne/Add/Update/Delete and Websocket for each data model. Even better would be a GraphQL interface.

- Authorization and Authentication

- No manual HTTP calls for standard cases. I want to define my model at the server and have the data available in an array at the client. As soon as a client inserts a record in his list I want that automatically a POST with the new record is sent to the server, it verifies the model and the authorization and inserts the record into the database. Then the server notifies the other clients about the change using websockets. The other clients see the new data record in their array without having to write a single manual HTTP call or websocket connection.

- Open Source Only. No Firebase or similar.

I've been searching for a while, but haven't found anything that seems reasonable. If I don't find anything I will write a small framework myself. I apologize if I seem lazy and don't want to search myself, but I'm really getting desperate. I want to spend as little time as possible on writing boilerplate and instead write business logic. There are thousands of javascript frameworks out there but none of them seem to handle these simple standard cases very well. They all require manual implementation of CRUD for each model or manual data fetching and subscription. Please make suggestions for frameworks and help me to see through the framework jungle!

Not a framework but I'm tinkering with the following stack:

1. Hasura - DB + Basic APIS

2. Ory.sh for Auth/Authz

3. React on the frontend

4. Windmill.dev for Scheduling/Batch processing/ Background tasks

5. Docker for deployment

6. Fastify + Node JS for glue code (can use Windmill for Glue code too)

I have used Hasura extensively at 2 companies. It's well done and saves a ton of time.

You might also want to look at Retool (and its open-source alternatives). Web dev has become simpler now.

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If you like code-focused solution: Rails, Laravel and Django are good options.

I'm not fully sure but maybe Blazor (.NET) could suit your needs?

I have no idea what the status of MeteorJS is, but looks like it could fit your requirements.

Founder of Grafbase here. We are currently in private beta, but at working closely with the community on our way to public beta. Ping me in our Discord if you want to chat!

Consider OpenAPI for the first two points - you can define a schema (YAML or JSON) and use it to generate both server & client stubs.

Depending on the language/framework used it'll validate too - e.g. the python backend framework connexion (a thin wrapper around flask) will 500 if you return a non-conforming response, and 400/405/etc. if the request doesn't fit the declared schema, automatically.