Four ways to build web apps

Blog posts like this always strike me as…weird.

This seems like “how to build a web app for a very tiny subset of people who don’t want to learn about deploying web apps”.

Maybe I’m in a bubble? It seems like 99% of the people I know actually running profitable companies have an infrastructure that roughly matches to “some Linux server somewhere”, and then upward from there it all just moves to AWS/azure, but it’s still just some Linux machines maybe with a load balancer in front of them.

If you’re writing software and don’t seem covered by this blog post, don’t feel like you’re out of the loop on something. I think this author is just writing about the subset of the ways that he knows about.

I mean honestly “HUGO static sites”…how about a directory of html files hosted by nginx or Apache?

Cloudflare open sourced workerd, the workers runtime. [0]

Of course there is more to the platform than just that, but your code isn’t exactly unportable anyway.

[0]: https://blog.cloudflare.com/workerd-open-source-workers-runt...

> I mean honestly “HUGO static sites”…how about a directory of html files hosted by nginx or Apache?

Whether you put HTML files on the mentioned services or have a build step with a static site generator is not the point.

Where does your nginx server run, how do you keep it up and running, how you do provision it, how do your files end up on the server?

You can write a bunch of shell scripts and do all of this on a cheap VM for 5 bucks. Or you can get it for free on some of these services with git integration, global caching, web hooks, previews, cheap storage, image optimization etc. You get unlimited or at least a lot of sites and it's all automatic. On some you can even just drag and drop a directory into their web interface and the website is there in a couple of seconds.

It's basically a different layer of abstraction that's free/cheap and works nicely for simple use cases or as a specialized part of a more complex deployment architecture.

I have personally recommended netlify, cloudflare etc. to people who have the technical ability to write HTML/CSS or use a static site generator. Those things are very easy to use and carry around less risk than having to provision and configure a web server yourself.

Free, for now. Once the higher interest rate environment becomes more normalized, I would not be surprised to see many services become paid.

I could do this, or I could just throw good old React or a derivative framework at whatever UI I have to build and be done with it.