We're breaking up with JavaScript front ends

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on news.ycombinator.com

Our great sponsors
  • SurveyJS - Open-Source JSON Form Builder to Create Dynamic Forms Right in Your App
  • WorkOS - The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS
  • InfluxDB - Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale
  • unpoly

    Unobtrusive Javascript Framework for server-side applications

    Like others have mentioned, this seems to be from ~2016. The lack of HTTPS on the provided ages this some for me, but the use of coffeescript really dates this[1]. I even thought coffeescript had been deprecated, but it does seem that the project is being kept alive[2] which is really cool.

    Perhaps, what is most interesting is that it took nearly 4-5 years for the front-end community to collectively come to the conclusion that SPAs are not _always_the answer. I don't think the zeal for SPAs came from a bad place either. I can remember how poorly ASP.NET and other frameworks of the 2008-2012 era packaged an overcomplicated way to pass data to view layers. There's lots of curmudgeon-ining from non-frontend folks but, in my opinion, the lack of performance and ergonomics with existing frameworks, combined with the newness of Node.js is what brought about the explosion of tooling and frameworks.

    There is a place for SPAs, though. VS Code, Spotify, and other apps that need a desktop / browser experience to feel like a mobile app are great candidates. Twitter, for example, shouldn't be a SPA or SPA-like application. I find that it frequently over-caches content and will randomly refresh my feed at times while I'm browsing.

    1 - https://github.com/unpoly/unpoly

  • intercooler-js

    Making AJAX as easy as anchor tags

  • SurveyJS

    Open-Source JSON Form Builder to Create Dynamic Forms Right in Your App. With SurveyJS form UI libraries, you can build and style forms in a fully-integrated drag & drop form builder, render them in your JS app, and store form submission data in any backend, inc. PHP, ASP.NET Core, and Node.js.

  • htmx

    </> htmx - high power tools for HTML

    Seems like a half-baked agency-built version of htmx[1], no?

    I'm actually very intrigued by the whole "let's take a step back and move a lot of our logic back to the server" approach to modern dev, but IMO when you need more than statically rendered pages, it should look a lot more like Phoenix LiveView (if you're using a framework) or something ultra-minimal like Slimvoice[2] if you want to go the bespoke route. Not this.

    [1] https://htmx.org/

  • rails7-on-docker-mysql

    Working Rails 7 demo application with mysql

    "I want to provide a link to it, but I honestly don't know any great docs for it!"

    I setup a demo, rails7/mysql/turbo/docker - one command setup you are playing with it. https://github.com/james-ransom/rails7-on-docker-mysql. Give me a star you have a friend for life!

    Not PostgreSQL!!

  • turbo-rails

    Use Turbo in your Ruby on Rails app

    The readme seems to give a pretty good overview of turbo: https://github.com/hotwired/turbo-rails

  • iced

    A cross-platform GUI library for Rust, inspired by Elm

    You should break up with web based front ends and write them in Rust. :-)

    https://iced.rs

  • Stimulus

    A modest JavaScript framework for the HTML you already have

    Perhaps. And here's stimulus' official web page. https://stimulus.hotwired.dev/

  • WorkOS

    The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.

  • coffeescript

    Unfancy JavaScript

  • fresh

    The next-gen web framework.

    This is just problem of structure. I am not convinced that there is particularly higher chance to end up with "unworkable mess" with SSR compared SPAs (of course most projects end up being a mess).

    If you look at the hottest trend of the "island architecture". New frameworks like Astro (https://astro.build/) and Fresh (https://fresh.deno.dev/). They are basically what are you describing. All SSR but with dynamic parts. Seems like these "islands" by their nature are less entangled than full SPA.

  • astro

    The web framework for content-driven websites. ⭐️ Star to support our work!

    This is just problem of structure. I am not convinced that there is particularly higher chance to end up with "unworkable mess" with SSR compared SPAs (of course most projects end up being a mess).

    If you look at the hottest trend of the "island architecture". New frameworks like Astro (https://astro.build/) and Fresh (https://fresh.deno.dev/). They are basically what are you describing. All SSR but with dynamic parts. Seems like these "islands" by their nature are less entangled than full SPA.

  • Apache Wicket

    Apache Wicket - Component-based Java web framework

    Sort of sounds like Apache Wicket (https://wicket.apache.org/). I used it for a few projects in the mid-late 2000s. I really liked it being server side and the concept of having object-oriented HTML (code paired with HTML snippets). I haven't had a need to use it since 2014, so haven't kept up with the project.

  • turbo

    The speed of a single-page web application without having to write any JavaScript (by hotwired)

    I agree that Rails 7 has fantastic options for achieving fantastic "UI Fidelity" with traditional Rails high developer productivity.

    The official docs are decent:

    https://turbo.hotwired.dev/

  • Platform

    Qbix Platform for powering Social Apps (http://qbix.com/platform) (by Qbix)

    Over the last 10 years we have been growing our JS + PHP + MySQL framework and unifying the code across all concepts.

    We started before Promises were standard, before composer and NPM. Before Virtual DOM. Back when we started, there was CodeIgniter and Kohana and jQuery (anyone remember?)

    Along the way, we kept the vast majority of our code in-house. We didn’t want to pull in libraries or updates unless we understood their code.

    Looking at the latest and greatest, we were often wondering if we did the right thing. Some developers (especially JS) used to chastize us for not using the latest techniques like “two way bindings” of Angular 1.0 or JSX of React

    Then - lo and behold - Angular 1.0 is totally rewritten and all those concepts are redone. Over and over. And people come around to our way of thinking. Web Components and Templates appear. Shadow DOM.

    Our way of thinking is: use standards for HTTP/REST, HTML, HTTP, JS, CSS as they were intended. Every concept should work well with all the others.

    Result is at https://github.com/Qbix/Platform if you want to give any feedback. We have been using it for ALL our projects since 2011.

  • Reddit-Enhancement-Suite

    Reddit Enhancement Suite

    > I considered installing a redirect plugin to send me to the old.reddit subdomain

    I use RES[1] to force the old layout (along with many other things).

    1: https://redditenhancementsuite.com/

  • remote-standalone

    Many years ago a colleague and I wrote a stand-alone version of a package for my own arcane php framework called Remote.

    The idea was that you write in Web 1.0 and immediately get a Web 2.0 front end because it just updates what it needs to.

    I still think this is the holy grail of frontends:

    https://github.com/dgrinton/remote-standalone

  • inertia

    Inertia.js lets you quickly build modern single-page React, Vue and Svelte apps using classic server-side routing and controllers.

    An option that keeps both UI fidelity and server side simplicity is to use: https://inertiajs.com/

  • InfluxDB

    Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a more popular project.

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