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Comment by graboid | Hacker News Reader

Preact [0] + htm [1]

Why? Preact is small, fast, and reasonably easy to use. But the main selling point for me was that, together with htm, I don't need any build system a la webpack. No node_modules folder. I just have to load one script (preact + htm bundled), define my components in plain javascript files and import them. Bliss for me.

[0] https://preactjs.com/

[1] https://github.com/developit/htm

Edit: Just read that you want drag & drop style UI building, so this might not be for you.

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I used Lit for web components, with no build steps. I loaded it from unpkg [0]; but there are probably more production-ready CDNs in existence. It worked pretty well, especially since CSS styles can also be encapsulated inside of the shadow DOM of the components.

But for proper frontend projects, I would use typescript, and therefore a build pipeline.

https://www.unpkg.com/browse/lit@2.2.7/index.js

I'm thinking of trying ts + deno at some point since deno has built-in ts support.

It won't help with the browser-side part of the story though :-)

There's Deno Fresh now (https://fresh.deno.dev/) which looks like a pretty interesting new web framework so far.

Glad to see this. I used Preact and htm to build a small, events-flying-everywhere app that helped me get my current job, which I love. https://github.com/spaceaardvark/react-control-chaos

Highly recommend.

Came here to say preact is pretty nice and the no build pipeline thing is wonderful.

I needed to make a little thing "with a few screens" once, and using a react-like model of rendering specific components based on state just felt right. But I really didn't want to get all the CLI and front end packages involved because it was such a small thing -- and preact was exactly the ticket!

+1. We use preact + htm and no build approach to build Moochee (https://app.moochee.us/tryout). Super simple to use yet very powerful!

Ah no NPM! Vanilla JS with no build step. This is very interesting. Thanks.

See code example here: https://gist.github.com/developit/3631edd9033df8df5975786b19...

The drag and drop is more a rapid build tool than anything else. I'm, frankly, not likely to put all the love an effort in to the front end that I will the back end for small projects.

No build pipeline is very helpful, actually.

if you really don't want a build pipeline, then in js land your options are limited to alpine and vue. there may be more, but these two are more popular ones

preact is great: https://gist.github.com/developit/3631edd9033df8df5975786b19...

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