Ask HN: What is a lightweight web framework? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What is a lightweight web framework?

5 pointsmuzani9 comments

I'm building something targeting legacy devices. The devices are run on an old Webkit, able to run basic HTML/JS/CSS but not even things like CSS3.

We tried Angular 4 but it was too heavy. It does run with Node/express hosting a HTML file. What are some lightweight frameworks we can use between this?

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Given legacy devices, I'm not sure that vanilla JS is the best way to go, despite being a lightweight option.

Sometimes I think if you're dealing with an old browser(s), pick a technology of its time--in this case, perhaps jQuery (lightweight and ubiquitous).

It's like a time machine, where the old browser can say: "Oh god, thank you. Finally someone I can understand. Why do these kids keep asking me for promises? Promise what?!"

If this is a web based app (rather than a local app based on web technologies, like webos or windows phone), you should move as much of the processing server side as possible. Aim to not use a client side framework at all, if you can get away with it.

Obviously there's a trade off to be made between performance and development speed, but the more work you make the client do on a legacy device, the worst the user experience will be.

How fast is the network connection, if present? There's been massive strides in optimizing JS performance in the past few years, so a system prior to those is going to struggle with many of the modern frameworks. If the network is fast, you might get snappier results doing more things server-side.

Yeah, the devices themselves don't hold a lot of memory but the network connections are fast. Everything has always been done server side.

What does the application do? Why legacy devices? Why do you need to use a JS framework?

I think you can be this fancy with your CSS:

http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/

And use vanilla JS.

I've always liked raw JS, but frameworks are useful when there's dozens of API calls.p

Mithril always seemed pretty lightweight to me.

Why do you need a framework?

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