jose VS hono

JWT - jose

For demo purpose, we'll use some popular libs e.g. jose.

This module provides a lot of useful functions and utilities, but we will focus only on a couple of them. You can read more about the module itself if you feel like it.

Honestly, not exactly sure what the correct order is. The standard for encrypted jwt is called JWE. Most programming languages will have some kind of library that will handle the small details like order of operations. Example: jose for js.

I used standard Web APIs such as fetch() and WebCrypto. The most common thing I had to do was JWT token generation/validation. I worked with the jose library (the only dependency in the project) because it is cross-platform and also works with the WebCrypto API.

Biggest sharp edge I've encountered is the very much WIP WebCrypto API support. In practical terms, this means things like signing/verifying JWTs is not very well supported: https://github.com/panva/jose/discussions/243

That said, the situation is improving rapidly, and I've been personally willing to bet that the support will be solid by the time I finish prototyping and need to start adding auth to my latest project.

I used hono to implement worker.

Hono - Ultrafast web framework for the Edges

Hono is an ultrafast web framework for the edge and it's amazing. It's simple as express and the DX is mind-blowing. And now you can also serve JSX with it 🤯. Anyone in the industry for long enough knows that a setup like this can be quite tedious to manage and maintain. I might sound biased for Hono, and that's true, I love it ❤️.

Please could a fellow HNer who has experience using this explain in simple terms what Hono on a Cloudflare Worker enables that one cannot already do with a vanilla worker?

The docs[0] are not instructive on this point.

[0] https://hono.dev

Hono, a powerful framework, is our secret sauce for crafting high-performance APIs. With its intuitive syntax and seamless integration with Next.js, Hono simplifies the process of optimizing API performance.

Hono—a simple and fast framework for processing HTTP requests.

A good alternative of this can be - [Hono]https://hono.dev/

I agree that “fast, lightweight, web standards” isn’t much of a description but not too far down https://github.com/honojs/hono I did this:

> Hono … is a small, simple, and ultrafast web framework for the Edges. It works on any JavaScript runtime: Cloudflare Workers, Fastly Compute, Deno, Bun, Vercel, AWS Lambda, Lambda@Edge, and Node.js.

Hono offers good DX and a blazingly fast library to help you build your backend with native RPC embedded in its code. It has Zod support and it's written with TypeScript with very readable types so you can understand what's happening. It also supports Bun and a bunch of runtimes so you can run it everywhere. Check the documentation! It's also very helpful.

Initialize your hono project using bun: