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Comment by jstummbillig | Hacker News Reader

Have a look at AdonisJS.

It's in a somewhat weird spot: On the one hand it is mature and has amazing DX/UX going for it, with a lot of very thoughtful tooling. On the other, for some reason, it has always remained niche with just a couple of core developers, even though it's now nearing version 6 and at least 8 years of releases. I do not know why that is the case. It's a beautifully written full stack framework, taking having inspiration from both Rails and Laravel and in the world of web TS, it should get a lot more attention than it does.

Maybe it's just the weird name :^)

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I think it’s main problem is the lack of community. There are almost no third party packages and the core team is pretty small (one or two devs). I wouldn’t risk using it to find myself 5 years down the line using a zombie project I couldn’t move away from.

One thing is picking a library which I can replace if it it gets abandoned, etc. a very different one is picking a full stack framework where replacing it means rewriting everything.

If I wanted a full stack framework, I’d pick Laravel or Rails because they’re already proven, have a big community, are used by big names in the industry and I’m 99.9% sure they’ll still be around and maintained 5 years from now.

I partly agree.

Having a community is nice and motivating, but that makes building good software over that many years without ever being the community darling more impressive to me and seems like a great indicator for deep commitment, that gives me a different kind of confidence than hype and VC money.

I am not sure which sustains better in 2023.

I've also wondered why AdonisJS didn't quite take off and grow a community while another single-developer-centric framework, Vue, did.

But of course Vue is a frontend framework, and maybe the appetite for those was higher (and associated risk was lower) than for a batteries-included JS backend framework like Adonis.

I was looking at Adonis and was shocked at how much it reminded me of Laravel and Rails. The creator definitely had a ton of experience in one or both.

I use AdonisJs at work. Having used Rails and Laravel before it was a very easy jump.

I used AdonisJS. Reminds me a lot of rails but with the added safety of typescript.

Totally agree! I have used many frameworks (even written my own) but nothing gets close to Laravel for PHP and AdonisJS for TypeScript in terms of features out of the box and DX.

Adonis is inspired from Laravel but it’s far from being comparable. Features, community, “battle proveness”, third party packages, etc are just not there yet.

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