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Comment by drchickensalad | Hacker News Reader

Are there any good approaches for doing this without a specific framework?

You can do this right now in Chrome DevTools. In the sources pane any changes you make to CSS are live immediately. It's a text editor but totally live.

And if you want to persist those changes back to disk, you can do that, too. https://developer.chrome.com/devtools/docs/workspaces

Vim has a number of ways to do this. browserlink.vim for example. There are also grunt and gulp plugins for webdev repls.

Not really, for interactive UI development you need to model the UI as a pure function (no state in the view). So that limits you to React or React-like approaches, and game engines: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJr_TD1BtF0

For backed web development (in Clojure at least) there isn't really a lot of state in the first place - request comes in, request comes out, state is in the database not the application - so there are no framework constraints.

Depends on the backend platform actually. Apache CGI processes (PHP) are fire-and-forget per request. But for example Ruby and Node.js servers persist through request cycles. It's important that any state is unique to the request, sometimes even the caches should be per request.

Node.js has a package called piping that hot-reloads require()ed files. It makes interactive development possible. Checkout my backend and frontend interactive isomorphic starterkit: https://github.com/RickWong/react-isomorphic-starterkit It hot-reloads Node server code and client code your browser.

I use this and it works for me http://brettterpstra.com/2011/03/07/watch-for-file-changes-a...

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