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Comment by soulchild77 | Hacker News Reader

I created a pet project (REST API) with Hono and I'm seriously considering using it for future projects instead of what has been my go-to stack for years (Express, lately with Zodios).

Hono's middlewares, especially zod-openapi[1] and @scalar/hono-api-reference[2], make it really easy to define your REST endpoints once and get full typesafe routes with request/response validation, an automatic OpenAPI spec, a beautiful OpenAPI browser and you can even reuse the typings in your frontend with Hono's RPC[3] middleware, essentially giving you end-to-end type-safety without any code-generation.

Its maintainer yusukebe is a really nice guy who is always being helpful and very active. I want Hono to become the modern successor of Express. :)

[1] https://hono.dev/snippets/zod-openapi

[2] https://www.npmjs.com/package/@scalar/hono-api-reference

[3] https://hono.dev/guides/rpc

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> request/response validation

> beautiful OpenAPI browser

> end-to-end type-safety without any code-generation

That's a great sales pitch - I'd looked at Hono before but now I've opened all the links you mentioned and will try it out.

I'm very curious, I'm learning from both HonoJS and ElysiaJS about how to build a great next-generation library, and the thing that strikes me from Hono is that it seems it has integration for a lot of things, BUT you have to write a lot of manual code for those instead of "extending the base Hono" so to speak. For the `zod-openapi` example you gave, I'm looking at the docs and it seems there's no import in common from hono to hono/zod-openapi project:

    import { z } from '@hono/zod-openapi'
    import { createRoute } from '@hono/zod-openapi'
    import { OpenAPIHono } from '@hono/zod-openapi'

I would have expected/hoped things to be more integrated, e.g. you still do `import { Hono } from 'hono'` and then somehow you connect to this OpenAPI middleware. Any thoughts on this? Do you feel like moving from "base Hono" to use hono/zod-openapi you have to change how you do things? Another place I've seen this pattern is with the different edges, you have different import/exports, which I understand to certain degree but I still think a bit more could be done at the base library.

That's actually something I find a bit awkward, too. Especially, there was no way to re-use the global Hono error handler for all OpenAPI routes. I created an issue[1] with my suggested workaround and was told that that's the way to go. Maybe things are that way because `zod-openapi` was introduced later on. But I believe in the end it doesn't really matter that much as the code is clean and readable. :)

[1] https://github.com/honojs/middleware/issues/323#issuecomment...

> "in the end it doesn't really matter that much as the code is clean and readable"

The thing I'm worried about is the behaviour differences of having 2 different ways of importing things, exactly as it seems you found. That's valuable feedback, thanks!

We are using a similar stack. I assume your client is located in the same repo as your server? That's a no-go for us, so we're planning on using the OpenAPI spec to generate a type-safe frontend client. I kind of wish it was as easy as using the RPC middleware, though.

In cases where the client needs to stay separate, we have had a good experience with Orval[1] to generate a fully-typed @tanstack/query client from our OpenAPI spec.

[1] https://orval.dev/

Was looking to do this the same with Hono. Need a basic REST API. Possible for you to share your code?

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