Ask HN: What web frameworks do you use? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What web frameworks do you use?

I personally use Svelte(Kit), as it's simple and straightforward. I was planning on learning React, but the fact that it's owned by Meta really holds me back.

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> I was planning on learning React, but the fact that it's owned by Meta really holds me back.

May I ask why? React starts there, but it will probably survive Meta. Its a great framework, IMO.

I like Next.js

Next.js would be great if it weren't because of all the conflict of interests that make it have artificial limitations and the shady "features" it has and it were not driven by a marketing company.

For me it is an absolute no.

Being owned by Meta (or Facebook at the time) was a selling feature for me when settling on it. The main reason being that they use it heavily internally, and have a vested interest in its success as a result. They've built it to meet their needs, dogfood features internally, and feel the same pain as everyone else when it comes to breaking changes and backwards compatibility.

This gave me a lot of confidence in React compared to other frameworks at the time I was evaluating it. It turned out to be a great choice now 8+ years later, and I feel the same way today.

Django, mithril.js, and bootstrap.

Django since it's a "batteries included" framework. Mithril.js for react-like features. It's a small framework, so one could easily read through it's code to understand how it works if needed.

I'll swap Django for Flask for smaller/lighter services.

If I was starting a project today, I might use htmx in place of mithril.js, and tailwind in place of bootstrap.

I wouldn’t recommend using flask for new projects in 2023. The ecosystem is just a mess compared to Django or FastAPI on either end of the spectrum of full featured to lightweight.

Flask seems to rely on its extension ecosystem for core functionality, but the extensions frequently don’t play well together, are poorly documented, overly complex, and often infrequently updated (or become vaporware). From years of personal experience maintaining legacy flask apps as well as building new ones with the latest and most well maintained libraries, I believe it’s fair to say there really are no best practices when it comes to flask. At best you’ll have an app that is functional, but more complex, limited, and difficult to maintain vs a comparable app built with any other framework.

React using Remix (https://remix.run/)

I’ve used it for nearly 2 years in production

Highly recommend this video if want a good primer on the problem it solves: https://youtu.be/95B8mnhzoCM?si=EzKwMLbJW2602PJI

It’s built by the team that created the popular react router library, which has over a billion downloads since it was published;

It brought the joy of programming back for me, but more importantly it solves lots of typical headaches in react and helps me ship faster and with right amount of abstraction and levers to pull

If you’ve used react router, all that knowledge transfers over, if you have a react SPA with react router, very little to learn

Great for Frontend UI teams, but, it’s simple enough in my observation that several SRE & traditionally pure backend teams who’ve never built UIs at my company have adopted it for building their own internal tools & UIs

Deployable on all major platforms that I know, whether it’s serverless or not

I use the remix with expressjs template at work and for personal projects

I started using remix a while back and man, it feels really refreshing in the javascript ecosystem. It feels like they really have hit all the sweet spots that you are used to if you come from an older framework like rails/laravel/django.

Even frameworks like Nuxt or similar kinda solves the same issue but they always seem more front end focused and kinda leaves the database layer up to the developer. I love that Remix takes a stance here and helps you get going.

You have everything you need to get started quickly and the performance is great. It's also really easy to extend functionality with packages and seems like there is very few things that you'll miss.

Go/HTMX/Tailwind/SQLite

Nothing better than request latencies measured in microseconds on complex UIs built in an afternoon

What sort of tooling do you use for HTLM templates? Just the regular Go ones?

Not OP but I've shipped software in a similar stack and I used the standard html/templates package along with the embed package to compile all static assets into the app binary so that the entire app was a single executable.

Man I can't wait to see more of the go+htmx combos more and more.

Struts and JSPs with some hand-crafted JS and CSS (no JS frameworks). At least that's what I was using back when I did any semblance of front-end web development. Yes, I'm old and no I don't do it anymore! But I do work with a lot of folks on my team who use React for our web UI.

Struts 1, right? None of this Struts 2 nonsense :')

Django and FastAPI. Both great for different reasons. Bun has caught my attention lately, though I'm not super familiar with javascript let alone its frameworks and dependency nightmares. Bun seems to fix some of that though, at least at a cursory glance.

FastAPI, Vue, Tailwind CSS. I avoid a database until needed. React and Vue are very similar but find Vue more simple to start with, and I'm happy that it can do more fancy stuff too when time comes.

Kicking and screaming, I finally succumbed to TypeScript on the server. I used to do everything with Phoenix or Rails, but nowadays its hard to fight the full-stack type safety (even if its mostly an illusion) of something like Remix/Hono with React + Drizzle/Kysely.

I hate having to wire everything together, and how I might have to rewrite it next month, and how there is no standardised way to do anything, and how I have to install a library for everything and figure out how to make them work together.

But the types won me over.

Django, it does so much out of the box.

I've used React over the years, but now I mainly use Svelte. I like React, but for me, Svelte feels more lean and straightforward. Depending on how Threlte (a 3D library for Svelte) develops, I might switch completely. Additionally, React's Server Side Components are now introducing a paradigm shift, so it might be the right time to make the switch.

Blazor with C#. It allows me to focus at customer problems and easier at real-time functionality in B2B apps. It doesn't distract me with the ever breaking npm ecosystem shenanigans. We only use some gulp to compile sass code and minify a tiny bit of javascript.

This is what I was looking for. I used to use React/NextJS/Vue in the past, and the major gripe with that stack was the weight of the node_modules and the ever broken situation, every other week. I wish Blazor evolves a bit better with the Blazor United approach, and have some great support for the modern UI libraries.

Django checks a lot of boxes for me.

Django, vanillajs, react, phaser

IMHO, it depends on what you want to do:

I use WordPress for managing large amounts of content at https://last10k.com

I use ReactNative + TypeScript for developing a cross-platform app at https://github.com/hbcondo/revenut-app

I selected Phoenix's LiveView + Elixir + Rust for real-time streaming at https://last10k-com-live.fly.dev/filings (in progress)

Probably worth knowing React since there’s such a large install base and work, but Svelte or Solid may be preferable for new or personal projects.

But that’s only frontend, what middleware/backend do you like to pair them with?

Gatsby built and served Netlify. I love how its trivial to make hundreds to thousands of static pages with various react components and templates (mind you static doesn't necessarily mean you can't load outside data with an API)

With just a few Gatsby plugins & some tinkering, you can get a workflow that produces sites where each page has a 100 across the board on lighthouse

Backend is Django whenever a SGBDR-backed model is involved. Sanic otherwise for simple web APIs. Frontend is Unpoly + BS5 or Shoelace.

VanillaJS/Angular for frontend, .NET Core/Node for backend.

It shouldn't matter too much if a framework is being backed by Meta. If there's enough support, documentation and easy-to-find-answers for it, then it's probably a good choice. Just make sure the code is readable and the framework's concepts are simple and easy to understand.

I use static Svelte(Kit) + TypeScript + Tailwind on the front end, Go and Postgraphile in the middle, and PostgreSQL functions on the backend.

I did write my own PostgreSQL migration tool though, to make it easier to write SQL functions in my IDE: https://github.com/pgpkg/pgpkg

None. I write my own frontend, backend, db engine, libraries. Not completely of course, like I would still rely on Express and other heavy lifting when doing a node backend. If I need some special feature in the frontend I hunt for a library I can easily copy to my libs/ directory, but half the libraries that are used I wrote myself.

Rails and Phoenix when it's up to me, custom Go+React stack at work.

I actually went 3 years building Phoenix projects (2015-2018) and went back to Ruby/Rails, because it's really hard to beat the ergonomics, low ceremony, and expressiveness of the stack.

Might swing back into Elixir world if the right project comes along.

Pure HTML/CSS/JS, building

https://RTCode.io ( video https://rt.ht/yt )

https://RTEdge.net

At my last job it was all React and I was quite happy with it.

I'm trying to do web game development now and didn't want to fight the reconciler. I'm trying to build out stuff in Rust -> WASM but it's much harder than expected :) Not sure I could recommend it yet.

Are you building a highly interaction frontend application? I mean an actual application? Or is it static with some interactive components? CSS can go far these days. And you can always add little interactivity with a script tag on the page.

No, just curious.

I would highly recommend Imba in that case.

Scala and Play.

Honestly I don't like Play. I'm looking for a better alternative to it.

Aha another Play user.

I took over a rather large Play project at work and it feels like the worst parts of Rails, then there's a poorly-implemented, old ReactJS + bootstrap frontend on it.

Would highly recommend taking a look at Sveltekit [0] with TypeScript and drizzle-orm if you want a full-stack experience.

[0] - https://kit.svelte.dev/

Rails

Django, Next.js

I want to use Django+Next.js for a project, any tips on how to get started?

Probably with Django Rest Framework to create an API and Next.js would read in that API to render the frontend.

Gin-gonic on Go with nextjs on fe. Moving away from next to htmx at the moment.

EDIT: +grpc for services. Web just happens to be a http translation layer + websocket termination.

Hugo. I try to stick to HTML, CSS and Markdown. Typically, when you use more than that, you have less to say.

Axum + Leptos: Rust in the frontend, Rust in the backend.

None currently by my understanding of that, since all my sites are now static and generated by a bunch of makefile/shell/ImageMagick ...

SvelteKit + Prisma + Lucia-auth. I’m hooked,

rails for work, axum for side projects

How are you liking Axum? I also use it, after switching from Actix Web.

A little trait heavy, but overall it's ok! I like the extractors, didn't at first but I learned to love them.

Middleware::from_fn was a life saver in the current version, middleware was kind of annoying before that was added.

Would prefer something more like graphul but haven't given it a shot yet.

React (Next) for work and Solid (SolidStart) for personal projects, Astro for blog and static sites.

Small personal projects, laravel alpine tailwind livewire. Bigger projects, Vue and Go for backend.

Symfony (PHP)

First Polymer, now Lit. Lightweight library, makes building reusable web components a breeze.

CakePHP

Still? :) Don't get me wrong, I used to use CakePHP as my primary framework 10-15 years ago and loved it, but even then it was starting to lose traction as competition heated up in the PHP space.

How's your experience with CakePHP these days?

Also I am surprised to not see that many people replying with Laravel on this thread.

I’m learning Laravel now! But I haven’t deployed anything built on it yet.

astrojs (with some React) for presentation website, nextjs for anything else. For backend, I use Django if the project is complex or Go frameworks for micros.

By "web" do you mean "Frontend"?

That depends. By "frontend" do you mean "web"?

Username checks out

Golang + htmx ;)

FastAPI or LiteStar with python

Symfony with PHP

NextJS + Module CSS.

Vue + SST

React, Angular, Vue - fight!

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