Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Step-by-step tutorial to build a modern JavaScript stack from scratch

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 211 posts

Re: Step-by-step tutorial to build a modern JavaScript stack from scratch

#11

Post by Roboprog »

ng12 wrote: post #8
anon1253 wrote: post #3

I appreciate the effort, certainly do. But, and this a big but: the amount of tooling, libraries, complexity and systems needed for a "modern" web app is almost comical at this point.

Are you sure it doesn't seem that way to you because you're less familiar with the ecosystem? Compare it to a Java backend. You might pick Ant, Ivy, Docker, Dropwizard, Guice, Jersey, Jackson, Mockito, JUnit, etc. I don't consider that to be radically less complex than the front-end stack proposed here -- but it just seems that way because a lot of those are "de facto" tools.

Oh sure, let's pick on the fat kid :-)

Yeah, there's a lot of evil lurking in Java-land, but that doesn't stop people from having to use all those things, either.

Re: Step-by-step tutorial to build a modern JavaScript stack from scratch

#12

Post by Roboprog »

Roboprog wrote: post #10
anon1253 wrote: post #3

I appreciate the effort, certainly do. But, and this a big but: the amount of tooling, libraries, complexity and systems needed for a "modern" web app is almost comical at this point.

Describing that collection of tools as "minimalistic" was indeed a touch of irony. Angular (1.x) might not be "cool" anymore, but it can be pretty darn "minimal" to set up: https://github.com/roboprog/ang-prog-enh (above not quite done, it's for a presentation I'm going to do in December, but it's pretty close) React works better for many things - server side rendering for SEO; endless scrawling wall of chunks of mor…

I guess I should have said it is helpful that somebody is putting together a tutorial for what they feel is a useful path to a certain destination.

BUT, the author might want to address the "elephant in the room" that there is a certain amount of necessary complexity if you want to meet certain goals.

Re: Step-by-step tutorial to build a modern JavaScript stack from scratch

#13

Post by [deleted] »

Roboprog wrote: post #10
anon1253 wrote: post #3

I appreciate the effort, certainly do. But, and this a big but: the amount of tooling, libraries, complexity and systems needed for a "modern" web app is almost comical at this point.

Describing that collection of tools as "minimalistic" was indeed a touch of irony. Angular (1.x) might not be "cool" anymore, but it can be pretty darn "minimal" to set up: https://github.com/roboprog/ang-prog-enh (above not quite done, it's for a presentation I'm going to do in December, but it's pretty close) React works better for many things - server side rendering for SEO; endless scrawling wall of chunks of mor…

[deleted]

Re: Step-by-step tutorial to build a modern JavaScript stack from scratch

#14

Post by xg15 »

Roboprog wrote: post #10
anon1253 wrote: post #3

I appreciate the effort, certainly do. But, and this a big but: the amount of tooling, libraries, complexity and systems needed for a "modern" web app is almost comical at this point.

Describing that collection of tools as "minimalistic" was indeed a touch of irony. Angular (1.x) might not be "cool" anymore, but it can be pretty darn "minimal" to set up: https://github.com/roboprog/ang-prog-enh (above not quite done, it's for a presentation I'm going to do in December, but it's pretty close) React works better for many things - server side rendering for SEO; endless scrawling wall of chunks of mor…

...and I'm just sitting here, using jQuery..

Re: Step-by-step tutorial to build a modern JavaScript stack from scratch

#15

Post by rimantas »

anon1253 wrote: post #3

I appreciate the effort, certainly do. But, and this a big but: the amount of tooling, libraries, complexity and systems needed for a "modern" web app is almost comical at this point.

What's comical (or sad, really) that things built with this often are not even web apps.

Re: Step-by-step tutorial to build a modern JavaScript stack from scratch

#17

Post by Wintamute »

anon1253 wrote: post #3

I appreciate the effort, certainly do. But, and this a big but: the amount of tooling, libraries, complexity and systems needed for a "modern" web app is almost comical at this point.

The create-react-app tool from Facebook lets you create a "modern" (air quotes yours) web app with one development dependency and zero configuration.

https://facebook.github.io/react/blog/2016/07/22/create-apps...

It's surprisingly full featured. Testing, ES6, CSS, live reload dev server, building for production ... everything you need for the majority of React based web app builds. Literally up and running in minutes. Also you can just offload all of the cognitive burden of selecting tools to people much more qualified.

Judge the whole scene by one GitHub project if you will, but the "boo hoo web development is too complicated" meme is getting a bit old now. It's mainly coming from a place of ignorance. Yes it's been a journey for web development over the past few years, but there are powerful and simple tools available now that other platforms and communities could learn from, rather than just disparage.

Re: Step-by-step tutorial to build a modern JavaScript stack from scratch

#19

Post by k__ »

bsou wrote: post #7

Alternative stack that gets you much of the same stuff with less: TypeScript, React, Redux, Webpack, Immutable, Ava - TypeScript covers much of the benefit of es6/babel/eslint/flow, Ava covers chai/mocha, and webpack can cover most of what gulp provides

There are many alternatives to chai/mocha. Ava, Jest and Tape.

I wouldn't consider Webpack an alternative to Gulp. Gulp is more generic. But if you use Webpack you can replace to task-runner part with a few scripts.

When using ES6 or TypeScript I'd also consider Immutable to be optional, because of "const" and "Object.assign()/Spread-Operator".

Also, React & Redux can be replaced with 1 thing, when you use a framework that bundles view components and state management.

Post reply on HN