Ask HN: How does one build large front end apps without a framework like React?
I had a mind-blown-moment when I learnt that Obsidian was built without any frontend JS framework. ( https://forum.obsidian.md/t/what-framework-did-the-developer-use-to-create-obsidian-desktop-application/30724/11 )
The benefits, I can see.
JS frameworks move really quickly, and when we're working on a large, long-term project, it sucks when big breaking changes are introduced after only a couple of years. Sticking to slow-moving web standards (which are quite mature by now) increases the longevity of a project.
And the stability also means that more time is spent on delivering features, rather than on fixing compatibility issues.
There is also the benefit of independence. The project's success is not tied to the framework's success. And it also makes the project more secure, from supply chain attacks and such.
Because there is no "abstraction layer" of a framework, you also have greater control over your project, and can make performance optimizations at a lower level.
I feel not using a framework can even make us a better developer. Because we know more of what's going on.
But this alternative of using none... it seems rarely talked about. I want to learn more about building large (preferably web-based) software projects with few dependencies.
Do you have any suggestions on how to learn more about it? Are there any open source projects you know which are built this way? It needs to be large, complex, app-like, and browser based. I'm more interested in the frontend side.
Thank you!
> JS frameworks move really quickly
React is a lot more stable than I think you're giving it credit for.
> And the stability also means that more time is spent on delivering features
Frameworks/libs also exist to save you time, thus letting you spend more time on delivering features. And fwiw, the obsidian team seems to agree in principle. Your link goes to a forum post of some kind, in which one may find a link to obsidian's third party deps: https://help.obsidian.md/credits#Third+party+acknowledgement...
These do not include React, but do include:
- i18next - lezer - moment.js
Plus a bunch of others. Why didn't obsidian write their own date lib and chose to use moment.js? Because it saved them time, despite the fact that moment.js does make changes, and many people are moving on from it in any case.
The idea that not using a frontend framework will let you focus on delivering features seems reductive, and the obsidian anecdote doesn't support the idea anyway.
Whatever you're building, it's never a bad idea to deeply understand the tradeoffs that using a library will bring. Obsidian probably couldn't accept the downsides of React due to them needing a bunch of custom renderers for content, which React makes harder. But that is likely a rare constraint for apps in general.
Generally speaking, libs like react exist to save you time and help you focus on delivering features.
> React is a lot more stable than I think you're giving it credit for.
Hooks are only 5 years old. The docs were revamped 2 years ago and there's lots of dead links to the old docs page which has a scary warning "These docs are old and won’t be updated." Create-react-app was deprecated in February of this year and in their blog post they tell you to use frameworks like Next.js.
And then there's the ecosystem. Next.js introduced app router 3 years ago and lots of docs for libraries still assume you're using pages router. Remix is now react router v7, and I have no idea what's going on with all this Tanstack stuff. There's a new typescript compiler called "Speedy Web Compiler" which just came out in April and as a result Vite now has 4 options for creating a new React project: react, react-ts, react-swc, react-swc-ts
Meanwhile moment.js has had 5 releases in the last 4 years. 3 of them in 2022 and 2 in 2023.
> Hooks are only 5 years old
7. Worth saying that React really only took off 9-10 years ago, so hooks are damn near the beginning of time for _most_ react devs.
> The docs were revamped 2 years ago and there's lots of dead links to the old docs page which has a scary warning "These docs are old and won’t be updated.
IMO those are not dead links. A link is 'dead' if it links to a page that doesn't exist. Links to old pages with warnings are appropriate in many cases. Many projects are using older versions of react, and devs need to look up info. Not sure this should be seen as a problem.
> Create-react-app was deprecated in February of this year and in their blog post they tell you to use frameworks like Next.js.
Not sure why this is a problem. A very early tool got deprecated, and the react docs recommend the current paradigm. It's not like they're changing their getting started guidance every month, or even every year.
> Remix is now react router v7
If this is a bitch fest about React, then the react docs and CRA are fair game, but remix isn't IMO.
None of these are problems taken separately, but put together they're pretty frustrating. Hooks being 5 years old and being the predominant tool for certain tasks shows that the community only figured out how to solve a particular problem 5 years ago. Compare that, in terms of stability, to Python having coming up with the idea of packages a long time ago, and packages are now a stable part of the ecosystem (packaging is another story which I'll get to shortly).
Revamping the docs is not a problem by itself, but take a look at Python or Django, their docs have the same look and feel for older versions of the code. It's totally a minor problem, and if it were the only one I wouldn't be complaining here, but with the plethora of problems it starts to feel like death by a thousand papercuts.
> Create-react-app was deprecated
Going back to Python packaging, while it's much better than C/C++ packaging, people still love to complain about it! That said, pip is not deprecated. For React to just abandon the idea of helping users to create a project and telling them to "go bother someone else about it" does not seems like something a stable ecosystem would do.
> If this is a bitch fest about React, then the react docs and CRA are fair game, but remix isn't IMO.
It absolutely is a bitch fest about React because I inherited a simple site that should have never used React in the first place and it makes it so hard to do simple things without reinventing the wheel, but anyway, I'd say the ecosystem is fair game now that CRA is deprecated and the docs themselves tell you to go to Next or Vite or React Router or Tanstack.
Anyway, the point is that while React might be relatively stable from the point of view of the larger javascript ecosystem, it's still way less stable than it should be and way less stable than browser APIs.
> None of these are problems taken separately, but put together they're pretty frustrating. Hooks being 5 years old and being the predominant tool for certain tasks shows that the community only figured out how to solve a particular problem 5 years ago.
Hooks are ~~7~~ 6 years+8months old, almost 7 years. This may not seem like a significant difference, but IMO it puts them 75% of the way back in time to when react took off versus 50% of the way. That is a significant difference. Please stop repeating the 5 year number. It's _provably_ wrong and not a matter of opinion: https://legacy.reactjs.org/blog/2019/02/06/react-v16.8.0.htm...
> does not seems like something a stable ecosystem would do.
I don't think being a 'stable ecosystem' means owning every part of the dev process, or even most of it; nor have they ever intended to do so (they didn't reimplement npm, webpack, etc). CRA existed to fill a particular need for a time (providing a simpler/more stable interface in front of webpack), and when that was no longer needed by the community, they abandoned it. I don't understand why this matters. Better tools emerged, the React docs/guidance reflect that.
> because I inherited a simple site that should have never used React
I'm sorry that you're in that situation. The React community is not really responsible for that IMO, and I don't think the things you've highlighted have meaningfully contributed to making that worse. I stand by the fact that deprecating CRA once great alternatives emerged was the right answer. Next is probably a good answer for many people too. The react team is and should be writing recommendations for the common case for their library, and the fact that your simple site falls outside of an ideal case for React doesn't mean they're not writing the correct recommendations.
While we're keeping score, document.getElementById came out in 2000 [1] and XmlHttpRequest was standardized by mid-2000s [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Document_Object_Model
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMLHttpRequest
> Hooks are ~~7~~ 6 years+8months old, almost 7 years. This may not seem like a significant difference, but IMO it puts them 75% of the way back in time to when react took off versus 50% of the way.
I don't disagree with your overall point here, but if you're going to be super nitpicky and pedantic about this, then you can't call 6 years and 8 months 75% of 10 years.
Saying hooks is "seven years old" is just being pedantic. I worked on a major project in 2019 where making the decision to use hooks was a huge leap of faith. It did not become the default way of writing React code until 2020/2021, so five years is more than accurate enough.
- Dan Abramov's first big conference talk was in October 2018
- The official release was in React 16.8, February 2019 - that's six years ago
I'm gonna be honest, I've been developing with react for about 9 years across a lot of projects and companies. I've never used next.
Maybe I'm out of touch, but I don't understand why people think it's so tightly could with the ecosystem
There is a large amount of what _might_ be described as astroturfing on the part of vercel to push Next. More charitably, vercel/the next community publishes a very large number of good tutorials/boilerplates/etc that are built on top of next.js.
If you check the docs for how to create a react app the first thing they recommend is to use next.js.
Oh interesting - I haven't been on their starting page in years. I'm surprised getting started with vite isn't higher up. That takes 5 minutes and doesn't require a full framework.
That said, starting with react router or expo is probably the right call depending on the project needs. Routing is not something you want to do yourself, and react native is pretty unfriendly without expo
Most of your complaints are about things that are not React. Those are optional. I can still standup a vanilla React stack in an afternoon just as easily as I did 5 years ago and immediately start writing the exact same code and have it "just work".
I’d argue it’s easier than ever today, thanks to Vite
> Hooks are only 5 years old.
That is a long damn time in this industry, and class-based components still work just fine.
I preferred class based components. The pretend functional programming style of hooks is quite imperative when you prick a little beneath the surface, so classes were probably the right abstraction.
The problem with classes that hooks helped with was how hard it was to add multiple, reusable bits of lifecycle functionality. In even a medium size codebase I'd find myself having to reason about how to combine behavior A with behavior B in the onComponentWillWhatever methods. Hooks are weird but much much easier to compose and share.
> React is a lot more stable than I think you're giving it credit for.
That's until you have to use it in a real project, for a long time the go to solution was the facebook maintained CRA which is now deprecated. I have spent a lot more time than I'd like to admit migrating webpack versions when it was considered best practises to use class component with decorator but decorator never was standardised in the browser and was never able to get a clean project where running npm install would not give scary warning our project had high vulnerability that was dependencies of dependencies in CRA to the point that it got me wondered that even if the creator of react facebook can't get their shit together, the whole ecosystem is doomed. I have been outside the ecosystem for a year and looking at the shit show that is nextjs it seems things are even worse than before.
I agree with the Next shitshow, but webpack/CRA was always shaky while Vite's sane defaults (and great reloading) has been a great improvement for us outside of the Next world and functional components now feels like a fairly non-error prone and simple way to work so I don't see that going away for a long time (and has already lasted a bunch of years).
I think the only shaky moving part for us right now is styled components being left behind due to the RSC changes, but there's both mostly source compatible rewrites as well as perhaps even better alternatives (vanilla-extract).
Agreed... I quickly ejected from the couple CRA projects I've used and quickly switched to Parcel, then Vite as they matured as it's just a much better experience. Not nearly as bad as trying to update some of the testing frameworks.
These are good points, but many of them aren't specific to React, and in fact likely apply if you're rolling most of your own code. For example, the app that OP used to start the conversation uses webpack (https://help.obsidian.md/credits#Third+party+acknowledgement...).
> running npm install would not give you a dozen high vulnerability package
Yes, this is a serious problem, but mostly an npm messaging problem: https://overreacted.io/npm-audit-broken-by-design/
Dubious "regular expression denial of service" vulnerabilities seem like a general issue with the CVE bureaucracy lately. Like, maybe CVE-2020-10735 had a point that Python's default "int" type having unbounded size and a quadratic-time "str()" was a bit of a footgun, but now it's getting to a point where any use of backtracking in any context is just asking for a "high severity" ticket from the regex police.
> the go to solution was the facebook maintained CRA which is now deprecated
Not only did they deprecate it, they refused to acknowledge it's existence in the new docs which is wild to me.
It may have changed in the last year, but if you searched for "CRA", it would get 0 results. Again, mind-blowing considering it was the recommended way to build apps with React.
Instead, it was replaced with a section driving you towards adopting Next. Which then had to be whittled away at and updated to include other options all the while the React team acted hostile to any criticism of it. You either used Next or you were shit out of luck.
> I have been outside the ecosystem for a year and looking at the shit show that is nextjs it seems things are even worse than before.
My thoughts about CRA aside, you don't have to use the frameworks (I still don't). And if you remove Next from the equation, things are actually pretty cool. Suspense is cool, and you'll have to rip React Query from my cold, dead hands.
Unrelated to the topic, but wow, they're still using moment? I thought it was kind of deprecated and been trying to use other libs.
I think most of the complaints about moment are that it's really big (because of i18n and timezones). Obsidian isn't a web page/app, so it doesn't need to optimize bundle size too much.
It's unexpectedly mutable unless you've closely read the documentation, been bitten by the mutations, or are doing very simple date manipulations.
It's a great library, but it does need fewer footguns. date-fns is a good alternative.
> React is a lot more stable than I think you're giving it credit for.
A lot of the HN zeitgegist would have you believe React is the opposite, sadly.
The React ecosystem moves really quickly, and likes to re-invent wheels.
But React core APIs remain relatively stable, I've been using React the same way for many years at this point, and you can ignore the parts you don't like, like I'm ignoring hooks and haven't found a single use case where I needed them.
Could you please tell me how are you avoiding hooks? You're not using useState or useEffects?
One of the projects I sometimes work on uses class components + mobx; it runs circles around hooks in speed/debuggability/convenience IMHO.
I mainly use React via Reagent in ClojureScript, and literally have no use cases where I need to use useState/useEffects for anything.
Turning it around, what exactly are you unable to do without useState/useEffects?
When I want to memoize something slightly complex, for simplicity's sake let's say sorting an array of objects based on one of it's keys. I can put that in a useMemo and it won't sort it again when the page eventually rerenders for some reason.
Usually that array is mapped elsewhere and those child components might also re render if the array is recalculated.
useEffects are when I need to call something outside of react, or when the page gets mounted or I need to call a function when something changes.
I'm still fairly new to this, the above examples may scream bad architecture to those more experienced, all criticisms welcome :)
> all criticisms welcome :)
No criticism really. Your useMemo example is the right use. Your useEffect use is fine, but for things like api calls (which 'call something outside of react' may refer to), you're often better leaning on something like react-query, which is of course built on top of useEffect. So still the right tool, but let others handle many of the sharp edges around that problem.
Thanks. I've started with rtk and saga hence the useEffect. I've since moved to rtk query.
> I can put that in a useMemo and it won't sort it again when the page eventually rerenders for some reason
useMemo dependency smell. This is almost always because your dependencies are wrong. This can often happen if you put a dependency as [object] instead of [object.field] due to how JavaScript maps objects to memory.
class components (which do not use hooks) are still supported by React with no scheduled deprecation AFAIK.
I build a lot of micro sites, but I still use frameworks — like Deno (node alternative), Hono (for APIs), and Alpine.js (for tiny lightweight sites).
you don't have to though!
if you want to do more pure vanilla, understanding signals is really useful — this basically powers svelte's runs and react's hooks and whatever.
I love nanostores, a 286 byte (!) state manager that lets you build highly reactive pages w/o the weight: https://github.com/nanostores/nanostores
flexible tools like tinybase (https://github.com/tinyplex/tinybase) and unstorage (https://github.com/unjs/unstorage) are also super useful
tools like this lets you build highly reactive, engaging sites that load for under 50-100kb
+1 for nanostores. It's great that it works standalone, but what's also nice is that they have tools to let you use it with React. It's much cleaner and more intuitive than React contexts which is how you're supposed to do global state in React, I think.
The frontend of my main OSS work was made is plain es6: https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash
The frameworky code is under 100 lines of code, heavily inspired by what I think is a good idea from React: "components are pure function", the simplest example of the about page beeing visible here: https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash/blob/master/pub...
Since the whole project was migrated over from React, I was able to improve performance to a degree that would have been impossible using React, it's a breadth of fresh air to open the performance and memory tab and to be able to optimise things from there to get 60FPS no matter what whilst preventing massive ram usage because those frameworks runs all sort of code that is out of your control. Also because there is no build system, I was able to introduce plugins to be able to patch frontend code via patch applied dynamically by the server to create features like the recall button to recall data stored on glacier when using S3, dynamic patching of the icons to apply branding and many other things that I would have had to fork entirely before
Anyway, I hope our industry would go more often the vanilla route, es6 is ready for prime time and solve all the pain point we had while internet explorer was still a thing
Exactly what I was looking for! Thank you! :)
The modern web platform is capable and not bad at all to work with directly. I love seeing projects like HTMX and the recent hyperflask etc showing the way, but you don't need to buy into a project to follow this path, just use the web platform.
Edit: for a more practical example, you don't need to go down the web components rabbithole just for native reactive components, MutationObserver can watch for your template fragments entering and exiting the DOM and run your init/destruct routines on them. Now you can just push HTML back from the server with fetch or xmlhttprequest or whatever, and as soon as your component's HTML enters the DOM it will be "hydrated" by your init routine via MutationObserver. Honestly, add some event signaling and XHR and you're further along to a smooth SPA-like experience than you might think.
Web components, copy/paste CSS that does crazy stuff, all of these Web APIs [0]. However, Vue is my go-to. It's just reactivity with files that don't break "separation of concerns". Plus a community if I get stuck. However however, making something super slim bare bones is the most rewarding.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API
First, I decide if I think the app will have lots of client-side interaction. As a shorthand, the question is “Does my idea seem like a spreadsheet, Google Maps, or a video game with lots of interactive clicking?”
If the answer to that question is “No”, then I’m not conceptualizing a SPA and don’t need a framework.
If the answer is “Yes”, I’d ask where I think that interaction will manifest in the experience and if I can isolate it.
If I am not looking at a SPA use-case, then my focus is on using vanilla HTML and Modern CSS with a tiny bit of javascript (as a scripting language versus as a programming language [1]). Then the remainder of the focus is on data modeling (CRUD), auth flows, and business logic development (what the application will do).
Beyond vanilla HTML, Modern CSS, and a tiny amount of javascript, if I need further client-side interactivity, I would consider something like htmx.
If I need interactivity beyond that, then we’re into SPA territory, but at this point the requirements and application have evolved to that point since we initially said we weren’t building that kind of thing.
Overall, the idea is to progressively iterate on the application, keeping the architecture and dependencies reigned in and aligned with the core objectives.
[1] JavaScript as scripting vs programming language: what I mean by this is JavaScript as a language with many warts is not so bad if its scope is kept small. I believe the issues with JavaScript arise when it is pushed to do too much. This then leads to needing to use Typescript as a matter of pragmatism. I aim to never get to the point of using so much JavaScript that I then need Typescript. I would say using it as a scripting language (to fill in gaps that Modern CSS and HTML cannot handle today) greatly minimizes the need for this progression.
I've written and re-written many toy and throwaway UI frameworks. It's fun! My current pet project is built on SFML, which is basically a thin wrapper around OpenGL.
If I had infinite time I'd probably do most of my UI work at this level. I enjoy the process of "how can I do x? I don't have a feature close to x, so let's go build it!".
I think this mostly stems from the trauma of dealing with winforms/wpf/uwp and from having seen JavaScript once before. I feel like I'm restoring sanity in the universe by stacking rectangles in a not-crazy way.
Frameworks don't have to be complex and all-encompassing. When I'm "done" with a project, its UI layer generally only supports exactly what the application needs and not much more.
The reason the big frameworks are so gnarly is that they try to do everything and thus do no one thing particularly well.
You should absolutely build your own UI framework or try laying out a UI from GL primitives. It's like the assembly of UI design. Not for everyone, sure, but I find it peaceful
Vanilla JS is very powerful and has the features you need to build SPAs without a big framework. Proxies and mutation observers are great for maintaining state, Updating the DOM yourself is fine, view transitions are awesome, etc. The only thing that's hard is routing, but there are lots of small dedicated JS libraries to handle that. Here's one I made that gives you the Express API on the frontend: https://github.com/rooseveltframework/single-page-express
If you're using Proxies and mutation observers you've probably created your own micro-framework. I wrote something like petite-Vue / Alpine as an excersice and it's really not much to them.
VanillaJS has no inbuilt type checking and your project will collapse under the weight of itself once reaching a certain size.
What are you talking about with this talk of implosion? It sounds like boogieman nonsense from small children scared of the dark. I prefer to use vanilla JS when writing large SPAs and it works just fine.
There is a stereotype from the outside world that a great many programmers are autistic. The irrational fear of not using a framework for code in the browser is one of those cases that really screams the stereotype for all to see.
If you are using TypeScript there is inbuilt type checking for the DOM, because TypeScript ships with a very good data type library that describes the DOM in excellent detail.
> What are you talking about with this talk of implosion? It sounds like boogieman nonsense from small children scared of the dark. I prefer to use vanilla JS when writing large SPAs and it works just fine.
It’s absolutely not and it absolutely doesn’t. Inheriting a VanillaJS project is often a nightmare because it screams “inexperienced developer” not to use a framework, so the code quality and build processes are often extremely low quality and undocumented.
The complete irrational fear about writing original code is either autism or low intelligence. You wouldn’t be so reliant on a framework if writing in C, Rust, Zig, or most other languages. Developers are reliant on frameworks in JavaScript because they cannot program and the barrier of entry is low enough that anybody can do it.
You come across as an asshole for professing this opinion “everyone else is autistic or dumb”, and also wrong. I would never want to work with you on a team; you seem like the type to flaunt existing best practices at any opportunity.
IMO: It's good to know how to manipulate the DOM directly. Any complicated web app will always hit some kind of corner case where you need to bypass your framework and manipulate an element. For example, the spinner that you see on https://manage.onopti.com/ is disabled with a pure DOM call once WASM + Blazor is started up.
That being said, as many other comments rightly point out, (for most projects,) if you work directly in the DOM you'll end up recreating what most frameworks do for you. It's really only "worth it" when you can strongly justify it: IE, if you're making a charting library that can handle thousands of datapoints, or a rich degree of interactivity that a usual business web site doesn't have.
But for a typical interactive website: Use whatever framework your peers at your company will be comfortable with.
1. web-components https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_compone...
2. router https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/URL_Pattern...
The rest should be code organization, not even a build tool.
Can check this example https://github.com/radio4000/components
Also, ES modules:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Guid...
You basically have the same capability you have in python or other ecosystems if you can be bothered to attempt what the OP suggests. Determining an appropriate way to organize your code is actually a really hard problem to solve if you've been leaning on 3rd parties to solve it for you. It's definitely a skill worth developing. Once you have it you will begin to dislike the organizational suggestions of others because they'll never fit your problem as well as a hand tuned strategy.
A few years ago I rebuilt a 3D model checker for the building industry and intentionally avoided a full frontend framework to keep the UI performant.
I wrote a small internal mini-framework to follow the MVC pattern and Web Components for reusable elements. I also used external libraries: three.js for 3D rendering, sql.js for handling the 3d's models meta-data in a performant way, and @tanstack/virtual for virtualizing large lists and tables.
The biggest benefit was finer control over performance. The main downside was a less comfortable developer experience — it’s harder to find polished, ready-made vanilla-JavaScript components, so you implement more yourself.
I've abandoned Next.js and React for Elixir / Phoenix. I am able to build a perfectly pleasant user experience with just a sprinkle of vanilla JS via Phoenix hooks.
The fact that I have been able to build a multi-user collaborative editor experience without a single additional dependency is incredible. I previously worked for a well-established and well-funded React team who had this feature on their roadmap for half a decade but still find it too daunting to implement.
Phoenix was a great reminder that a lot of the "frontend engineering" we find ourselves doing as React developers just isn't necessary with the right backend. It's HORRIFIC to look back at all the yakshaving I've done in my career already. Wrangling types (GraphQL, codegen libraries), wrangling queries and data-fetching (react-query, SWR, server components), fiddling with middleware (serverless functions, getStaticProps, CDNs). I've seen teams outright abandon testing because the hours they invested just weren't catching any of the bugs that mattered.
I'm not doing any of that anymore. I'm spending that time refining the core data model, improving test coverage, thinking about go-to-market and making money.
Phoenix may not be a good choice if your product has reached that level of maturity and product-market fit where you really should care about "microinteractions", fine-tuned animations, or advanced use-cases for an SPA like offline support and highly-optimistic UI. But I would argue that even mature products don't truly need these things. Just look at the GitHub UI. I've spent a truly astronomical number of hours in that UI and never wished I had WYSIWYG text editing, or animated skeleton UIs, or the dozen other things that the React community tells us we need.
I'm curious what is specific to Phoenix that made this so productive for that project? Is the frontend using something like HTMX?
They're probably using some features of LiveView; I'm not too familiar with how HTMX works, but with LiveView you can define all of your logic and state handling on the _backend_, with page diffs pushed to the client over a websocket channel (all handled out of the box).
It comes with some tradeoffs compared to fully client-side state, but it's a really comfortable paradigm to program in, especially if you're not from a frontend background, and really clicks with the wider Elixir/Erlang problem solving approach.
https://hexdocs.pm/phoenix_live_view/js-interop.html#handlin...
Hooks let you do things like have your DOM update live, but then layer on some JS in response.
For example you could define a custom `<chart>` component, which is inserted into the DOM with `data-points=[...]`, and have a hook then 'hydrate' it with e.g. a D3 or VegaLite plot.
Since Phoenix/LiveView is handling the state, your JS needs only be concerned about that last-mile JS integration; no need to pair it with another virtual DOM / state management system.
https://hexdocs.pm/phoenix_live_view/js-interop.html#client-...
The big win for me has been the built-in PubSub primitives plus LiveView. Since the backend is already maintaining a WebSocket connection with every client, it's trivial to push updates.
Here is an example. Imagine something like a multiplayer Google Forms editor that renders a list of drag-droppable cards. Below is a complete LiveView module that renders the cards, and subscribes to "card was deleted" and "cards were reordered" events.
```
```What would this take in a React SPA? Well of course there are tons of great tools out there, like Cloud Firestore, Supabase Realtime, etc. But my app is just a vanilla postgres + phoenix monolith! And it's so much easier to test. Again, just using the built-in testing libraries.
For rich drag-drop (with drop shadows, auto-scroll, etc.) I inlined DragulaJS[1] which is ~1000 lines of vanilla .js. As a React dev I might have been tempted to `npm install` something like `react-beautiful-dnd`, which is 6-10x larger, (and is, I just learned, now deprecated by the maintainers!!)
The important question is, what have I sacrificed? The primary tradeoff is that the 'read your own writes' experience can feel sluggish if you are used to optimistic UI via React setState(). This is a hard one to stomach as a react dev. But Phoenix comes with GitHub-style viewport loading bars which is enough user enough feedback to be passable.
p.s. guess what Supabase Realtime is using under the hood[2] ;-)
[1] https://bevacqua.github.io/dragula/ [2] https://supabase.com/docs/guides/realtime/architecture
It depends on the target product.
I'm working with JS for already 25 years. Tried all of the frameworks, and continue on doing it. And every time I try something new, the refactoring flow turns most of them into NextJS (if it's very UI rich or customer facing or something very web-oriented), or Vite+React+Tailwind (client) and Hono (backend) if it's more of a tinker toy needing more custom solutions.
The boilerplate with NextJS is cleanest (compared to all the other frameworks) and API is the most straightforward one, and you can safely ignore the vendor lock in. Its just a pretext to hate on NextJS. They all have some kind of a "vendor" lock in. Be it a vendor-or-a-specific-approach-or-whatever-lock-in.
And Vite+React+Hono — simplest to set up for quick experiments, and very powerful with minimal boilerplate. Will probably create a starter for this one, as I have been using this stack quite a lot lately.
EDIT:
You can pretend vanilla JS is all you need, but then your app grows, then you suddenly need types, and state, and more events and their handlers, and SSR or something else. Thus React has been the most stable bet for quite a while for me now.
I'm curious if you've tried Lit on the frontend, and if so, what you think about it.
I have tried it. And would like to reiterate – everyone should use what they like.
But for me Lit is too OOP. It feels like Angular. And that all in turn feels like Java. It's just so heavy and constrained (not saying it's a bad thing though). Too much boilerplate for me.
The whole paradigm is different and does not match my preferences. And while subjective, I do believe React with TS, Tailwind, zod, react-query and zustand is the best stack delivering the best balance of boilerplate and code-delivery and easy of use and entry level and dx.
Addressing the very first sentence in this post:
> I had a mind-blown-moment when I learnt that Obsidian was built without any frontend JS framework.
The comment you’ve linked to is wrong. Obsidian uses the Electron framework for its “front-end” framework.
In fact, it was even affected by the recent “Tahoe” Electron bug.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obsidian_(software)#Availabili...
Framework is unfortunately a term that's both ill-defined and quite overloaded. Electron is a framework in a very different sense than the "JS frameworks" op is asking about. The latter is about libraries with APIs and mental models for producing the UI & UX of web applications.
Electron is just a way of running Chrome without the Chrome UI around it, + a few APIs for accessing native OS APIs. You wouldn't say that Chrome/Firefox/Safari are frameworks just because they execute JS code and has APIs. In the context of this discussion, it is fair to say that Obsidian was built without a framework.
> Electron is a framework in a very different sense than the "JS frameworks" op is asking about.
The OP doesn't have a good understanding of what they're asking about, and that's okay. That's why they asked the question.
The linked thread is titled "What framework did the developer use to create Obsidian desktop application?". It's not asking about a web application and specifically referencing a desktop framework with: "He must be using some sort of desktop framework in order to push this out simultaneously right?".
> The latter is about libraries with APIs and mental models for producing the UI & UX of web applications.
Obsidian is not a web application. It is a desktop and mobile application. There is presently no Obsidian web application. So it would be odd to be asking about web frameworks for a non-web desktop and mobile application.
> Electron is just a way of running Chrome without the Chrome UI around it, + a few APIs for accessing native OS APIs.
No, Electron is a complete Javascript-based application framework. It does so much more[1] than that.
1. https://www.electronjs.org/docs/latest/api/app
Obsidian is a built using web technologies but it's not using any front-end JS framework. Electron is the runtime framework.
I mean, you're correct that Obsidian doesn't run on the browser. But it's built on web technologies. As a result, I would argue that the overlap between the skillset and work needed to build an app like Obsidian overlaps more with most web applications than most desktop and mobile applications.
You're also correct that Electron provides APIs beyond those available in the browser, such as access to the native filesystem. The way I see it, those are mostly some lower-level details it wouldn't be that hard to run Obsidian in the browser, it's just a product choice not to (specifically, it would imply creating a file hosting service). As the Obsidian mobile app demonstrates, Electron is swappable and not needed for Obsidian's core functionality. In contrast, had Obsidian been built on React, it would be rather difficult to simply "run without React" without rewriting the entire application.
How to build a large front-end app on non-web technologies (Swift, C++/QT, C#, etc) is also an interesting question but I didn't understand that as being the topic of this conversation.
I developed my note-taking app Daino Notes[1], which has a block editor (like Notion) and is written in C++ and QML using Qt. I wrote extensively about its development in my blog: https://rubymamistvalove.com/block-editor
[1] get-notes.com
You can just admit you were wrong instead of continuing to move the goalposts. :)
Everyone else in this thread is talking about (React/Angular/Vue/JQuery/etc) v.s. (Plain JS/Direct DOM manipulation/etc). Running that code on top of Electron or not is entirely orthogonal. So I admit I'm confused why you're fixated on bringing Electron into the conversation. Op's question appears to me like it references the last part of the linked thread: "I’d like to know what JavaScript framework (e.g. Vue, React) Obsidian desktop application is using for creating the user interface?"
Since we seem to be talking past each other, what do you think the conversation is about?
I thought we were talking about this (pasted from your comment above):
> "I’d like to know what JavaScript framework (e.g. Vue, React) Obsidian desktop application is using for creating the user interface?
And the answer to that question is: Electron.
Is that not the question?
Electron does not belong in the same category as React & Vue. JavaScript frameworks are commonly understood to mean:
- Third-party libraries, almost always implemented in JS (technically it could be some language compiled to WASM but I'm not aware of any commonly used WASM framework)
- Dynamically loaded from a CDN or bundled with application code at build time
- Provide an high-level API for creating and updating UI
- Whose implementation edits the DOM (a browser's low-level UI representation)
In contrast, writing an app _without a UI framework_, therefore implies writing first-party JS code that interacts with DOM APIs directly, without that level of abstraction in-between. This is not a common choice these days, and could be considered an impressive accomplishment, hence this Ask HN.
To create that UI, you use the same low-level DOM APIs in Electron as you would in the browser because well, it is a Chromium browser engine.
Example of each combination:
- Framework-using apps running in the browser: Airbnb, Figma
- Frameworkless apps running in the browser: HN
- Framework-using apps running in Electron: Figma's desktop app
- Frameworkless apps running in Electron: Obsidian
I wouldn't consider Electron as an answer to the question. It would be best described as a framework for running web apps as a standalone desktop app, but not a framework for creating user interfaces. Just using Electron doesn't make any progress towards having a solution for managing the complexity of writing code that interacts with the DOM.
I'm impressed by your patience. All I want to add is that you're 100% correct.
I can second the other commenter: you are having a different discussion than the rest of the comments and OP.
Spritemate is built with TypeScript + Vite + JQuery, and has a pretty organized structure: https://github.com/Esshahn/spritemate (I do not condone its use of the 'any' type everywhere tho)
I wouldn't use JQuery for a new project, as you can do almost everything it does with straight DOM manipulation. But there are still some strategic vanilla JS/TS packages that come in handy, e.g. clipboard, mousetrap, file-saver, split.js.
Web Components with Lit is kinda fun, though you'll have to deal with DOM shadow roots or disable them.
I would challenge that using a framework leads to less security. In vanilla JS you've got to use something like dompurify religiously to avoid XSS bugs, and you're tempted by the shiny candy-like innerHTML attribute.
Thanks for the reference! Yep, part of why I made this post is to see how I can avoid the innerHTML attribute. Do you think Obsidian's use of dompurify is closely related to their choice of going vanilla?
JavaScript is a really flexible language and it’s easy to build “just enough” abstractions to get stuff done. It may be hard to believe now but at one point web frameworks were not a thing. People used plain old JavaScript and maybe jquery. I worked on several large web frontends (SPAs) back in the 2000s that were pure JavaScript. I did a project in 2018-19 modernizing one to get it off of IE11.
So yeah, JavaScript is nicer nowadays, and browser apis are more consistent than they were then.
Back in 2000ish, a singular dude built a full-blown bank teller workplace app using IE4.0 proprietary features and client-side JS. Server communication was done by posting a form into a single-pixel frame and then looking for objects in the DOM of the returned html. It was fast, robust and scalable.
You have been conditioned to think frameworks are necessary. That’s not true. You can build anything without them and it would probably be better in many ways. Would you spend a ton of time? Yes. Would your code be harder to maintain? Yes. But it is absolutely doable and not as hard as you’d think
You can, but if you did you would likely just reinvent concepts that are in the framework. Maybe you will do a better job (problem is that many believe they can, and so do).
You could even write your own browser that uses python instead of javascript. However, it would only be compatible with python html pages. We stick with JS for web development because that is how the "browser framework" is designed. HTML, CSS, JS, etc. are all just part of that framework. If you wrote your own browser, you would need to reinvent all that as well.
I do not miss the early browser days, where different browsers could have been seen a different frameworks. Things go allot better when the browser framework standardized. I still suffer from the IE trauma.
Allot of what we see with JS frameworks ought to baked into the browser framework, but that process is uber slow, because people have to a agree, and people do not like to agree. But it is magic when they do.
There is a process by which functionality is pushed outward from the core to the edge. And there is another process by which functionality is pushed back from he edge to the core.
For example, people did things in JS over and over and over again and some off those things became browser functionality, and some of them became CSS functionality, and some prompted server and browser changes.
Yes, you are right, the process is slow. But when software has a way for people to customize it, that customization is a very egalitarian kind of feature discovery.
The reasons I avoid large frameworks like React, Angular, Vue, and even jQuery is that they are aren't necessary. They are code decoration that slows things down. Here is what you can expect without these:
* greater flexibility
* faster execution, My current application produces a large single page application that fully renders visually and executes state restoration in about 105ms localhost or under 200ms across a network
* faster maintenance, I can do massive refactors that touch most files in the application in about 2 hours thanks to thorough use of TypeScript interface definitions
---
Here is how I do it:
1. Just start building your application. Realize that for any significant application the front end UI is probably only about 20% of the application code, or less.
2. Start the UI by writing static HTML. Reserve JavaScript, in the browser, only for handling events and state restoration and execute state restoration only on page load.
3. I prefer to use WebSockets over HTTP as much as possible for absolutely everything I can get away with. WebSockets are full-duplex, where HTTP is not, and have far less overhead. That will substantially reduce the complexity around messaging in and out of the web browser.
4. Everything after that is just execution, planning, refactoring, and feature addition.
5. You can do absolutely all of it in TypeScript now without any compile step. Node.js now executes TypeScript directly, but the browser does not. To solve for the web browser just include the browser code into your Node application using ES6 module import. If the imported code is a function you can convert it directly into a string for transport, and otherwise use JSON.stringify for objects/arrays.
> To solve for the web browser just include the browser code into your Node application using ES6 module import.
I don't follow. How do you include the browser code without the compiling step?
Not sure how you avoid reinventing any of the component frameworks. Writing custom JS component backbone style seems tedious and error prone. Manually modifying the DOM on changes means writing the same logic several times, once for the initial render and then repeated in every event handler that has change the state of the UI. Alternatively, you might just be nuking your DOM with inner html and then running everything again through the initial rendering logic. But this isn't ideal, components loose focus, there can be glitches, and it can get slow. Not sure how you could make the type of complex UI heavy apps and have any greater flexibility or faster maintenance.
> Not sure how you avoid reinventing any of the component frameworks.
You don't do framework nonsense. That is all there is to it.
For most people writing JavaScript for employment it is absolutely impossible to imagine any universe where a couple of lines of code could be written without something that looks like a framework. That is not a limitation of the language, but rather a limitation of the given developer's imagination. The problem is thus a person problem and not a technology problem.
I do not use innerHTML because that is string parsing, and one of my critical performance steps is to avoid parsing from strings, except JSON.parse when needed.
When you're writing only a "couple lines of code", you can do pretty much anything you want. There's no real tradeoffs to discuss except in a theoretical sense, because the stakes are so small.
If the app being built is "large" (which I understand to mean, has high essential complexity), then those tradeoffs matter a lot. If the app is built by a team instead of an individual, the people problems become significant. Those can very well be turned into a technology problem. The technology (framework in this discussion) can be used, among many other things, to establish a consistent way of solving the problems in the application, which alleviates many people problems.
> When you're writing only a "couple lines of code", you can do pretty much anything you want. There's no real tradeoffs to discuss except in a theoretical sense, because the stakes are so small.
The JavaScript logic in the browser is comparatively small compared to the total application. This is absolutely more true when you remove the bloat imposed by a large framework.
Frameworks do not exist to alleviate problems for the developer. They exist to help the employer with candidate selection and training elimination to expedite hiring and firing. I can understand why a developer who is utterly reliant on the framework to do their job might think otherwise, which is a capability/dependence concern.
That you believe frameworks were invented to serve employers is a cynical point of view. I'm sorry for whatever bad experience you've had with the frameworks or people using them that caused you to develop this viewpoint.
A developer choosing to use a framework doesn't mean they are reliant on it, any more than choosing a particular language, library, text editor, tool, etc. It simply means they decided it was a helpful way to accomplish their goal, whether that's to save time, or establish consistency, eliminate categories of problems, avoid re-inventing the wheel, etc.
I don't know if you're aware of this, but you're coming off as incredibly arrogant with your strong claim that frameworks are used by those who don't know better. It's easy on the internet to vaguely gesture at "developers", but most of us are individual who've built software with real users among other demonstrated accomplishments. Strong claims require strong evidence, I hope you have the arguments to back it up.
I hear the exact same self absorbed reasoning on other subjects from my autistic child almost daily. The psychological term is fragile ego.
For example: It’s not that the developer reliant on the framework is less than wonderful. It’s that everyone who differs in opinion is obviously wrong and/or arrogant, because the given developer cannot fathom being less than wonderful.
If you are writing the same DOM update code in each event handler you can abstract it into a function.
What I'm saying, say you have 3 dependent dropdown pickers, selecting an item in the first one determine which of the other 2 are shown. When you have reactive interfaces like that, it's hard to extract the common "business" logic. Either you redraw everything from scratch or you do a sort of show/hide on DOM elements as in jQuery days. Not sure how you can abstract that. If you do abstract it, you end up with backbone, vue, react, or other in any case.
You are still thinking in terms of framework goodness, which is why this is challenging for you. Don't do that. Don't redraw anything. Don't create some shallow copy, cloned node, or other insanity. You don't need any of that. You don't need to litter your code, most especially your DOM nodes, with a bunch of business logic insanity.
All you need is the event handler. The event handler can be assigned to a node's event property directly, but if this is for a commercial site with lots of third party analytics/spyware you need to use a event listener instead because those third party libraries will overwrite your event assignments. The event handler receives an event object as an argument with a reference back to the given DOM node.
All the business logic should be stored in a single location representing a given business function, typically far away from the browser logic. It makes sense when you write the code without using a framework. If you write the code and try to make it look like a framework it will look like a framework, unsurprisingly. If you don't do a bunch of framework component insanity it will not look like a framework.
This is a person problem, not a technology problem.
I did not understand the event handler part. Could you make an example?
- The complexities of both of these tiny pieces of code is similiar (I would say)
- React needs to load a big bundle
- React spits out a large stacktrace with react internals if something goes wrong
- React is slower
- React code cannot be easily stepped through with the debugger
- React needs a build step
- React performance is very unpredictable (this is more of a problem with many elements and dynamic code)
Your next question might be what you do once your form grows huge. See my other answer to @iliaznk how I handle that.
Yes and then add few other pieces of state and interdependent components, the reactive code will extend, the manual patch job of connecting listeners and mutating DOM will start falling apart. The first example is okay for a one off but can't be reused as a component. It's also easy to get in a place where you have to update 3-4 different handlers to include a logic change. In a component based library/framework, you ideally update the state logic in one place and the UI just reflects that. For example, making the UI dynamic with a button that adds/removes multiple items that need this show/hide logic, you would need to attach new listeners, clean up listeners, clean up DOM items, and so on... my first example was only illustrative, but not to be taken literally. There a complex UI state in many apps, and reactivity with component based reuse is easier to manage and make sure all states are covered. Many times in my jquery years 10-15 years ago I had failed to update one piece of the DOM and there would be bugs that just aren't happening with component UIs.
I agree separating your UI into components is important. If React learned us one thing it is that keeping related stuff together is the way to go. Separating into components and keeping your functions as pure as possible gives you 95% of what makes React great! You can read my answer to @iliaznk on how I do this.
cleaning up listeners or cleaning up DOM nodes is rarely needed. Just remove the component element and the browser cleans up automatically.
> and even jQuery is that they are aren't necessary.
JQuery was never considered "necessary". It's just a much prettier wrapper around the native dom apis. Arguing against adopting a more readable api (and codebase), is gonna be a tough sell.
Nobody worries about fashion when buying a shovel. Your users don't care about your code fashion. These things are clear when an outside party can observe your developer habits and inform you where your priorities are as opposed to what you state they are.
> Nobody worries about fashion when buying a shovel.
Huh? Are you implying the code will never get read by another developer or possibly modified? Are you arguing there is no reason to make your code more readable?
> These things are clear when an outside party can observe your developer habits and inform you where your priorities are as opposed to what you state they are.
What?
Frameworks aren't necessary in the same way that high level languages aren't necessary. It depends, it always does
If you want to ship an MVP next week and you spend 6 days setting up your env, you've already failed. If you can get a framework with at least 80% of the features you need, suddenly you have 6.5 days left to build the product
If it takes you 6 days to set up your environment there are bigger problems than framework choice at play. It does not take more than a couple hours to fully prototype some HTML and some JavaScript/TypeScript in the backend.
Draw.io is quite good, and it is made without using any frameworks. Alas, the source code is not open to learn from.
<https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-tools-and-languages-used-i...>
> source code is not open
What about this: https://github.com/jgraph/drawio
> What about this: https://github.com/jgraph/drawio
That repository only contains the minified code, not the original source.
Holy shit dude, all those years I was dead sure it was open source and all.
Like a "proof that open source is working", a show case of a good quality, open source project.
Oh well, time to strike that one off the list.
As an old developer 30+ years. I love to build from scratch with no frameworks, but it is not viable for corporate development requirements. For many personal and yes large projects I still write from scratch. I will be the first to admit I hate building pretty sites so mainly focus on functionality rather than look and feel. Again corporate world would hate that. Frameworks make things easier, and faster, and yeah mostly run better. But they do lose the details of developer really knowing what every bit is used for, and how they made it work.
Every time a company refuses to use a framework for a large web project, they end up reproducing all of its features - badly.
And, when a new developer comes in who knows React, they can ramp up fast and even if they don’t, there are plenty of resources instead of asking Bob how something works - if Bob is even still working there.
This is one of the myths that feeds React's popularity. The few times I had the chance to be part of a project using an in-house framework, it was actually quite pleasant.
You can (and they will) build a massive house of cards on top of anything, in reality that new React dev will the take the same amount of time to ramp up, or worse if you're not careful. Learning the extensive collection of libraries in use, how they are glued together, application architecture, entry points, data and state management, build, deployment, asset management, etc is what takes most of that time. Having documentation for APIs can't help you there.
You’re still not taking into account resume driven development when they get ready for that next job. Would they rather say I built the website using Bob’s bespoke framework or React?
If a migration of breaking changes seems like a lot of work for you then I suppose that rolling your own framework won't be any better.
With the framework, you have structure. It might not be the best structure to use, but you have one. React lasted really long and is still works today.
Going without framework works if:
- you have a really small project
- you are so advanced developer or have specific use-case that using a framework creates more burden than time saving
- you are creating something so valuable that reimplementing it yourself is worth it
I think that regular website will bleed via maintenance costs in the long-run if you don't use a framework. Instead of paved road with framework migration you would be fixing and debugging bugs in your framework/codebase.
The important thing in any "large" application is to set consistent patterns for doing common tasks: creating UI components, re-using them, updating their content as a result of data changes (reactivity), etc. This can be done with or without a framework.
A framework establishes a large portion of those patterns upfront. If the framework is a popular one (e.g. React) rather than an in-house one, it makes it easier to quickly ramp up hires and have a lot of documentation/examples online. Popular frameworks also implicitly contain a lot of knowledge from years of feedback from thousands of devs exercising its APIs and providing feedback, so they're typically pretty good at solving common use cases.
Obsidian was initially built by a single developer. One of the best that I have the pleasure of knowing, but when you're one person, it's much easier to create your own pattern and have it work for yourself. They have since hired maybe 2 other devs, with minimal intention of hiring more, so ease of onboarding isn't a significant concern to them the way it would be for most companies (and "large" frontend apps more often than not require larger teams, by definition).
Thank you for your comment (and replies). This makes me realize that we can also actively choose which patterns of a framework we want to use, and which aspects of a project are better built to work independently.
Also, so cool that you got to know Silver! Their team is small but very talented, I look up to them a lot.
You build your own framework in some sense, it's a good learning exercise. Modern component frameworks can be anywhere from highly abstract to relatively light weight. If you're mainly using something like Vue, you just need to figure out where and when to update the dom, where to store data temporarily, etc..
Things get unwieldy at a certain scale when you don't have something like Typescript regardless of whether you have a framework, but you could start by building up small bits of the frontend stack from scratch. I learned how to do a bunch of manual raw js stuff from scratch originally, then did some professional work with YUI at a huge scale which was probably as close to an event driven frontend system as you can get. Start by figuring out how to listen for url changes, make a network request library from scratch, store data somewhere.
Imo one of the beautiful things we now get along with frameworks is a host of independent build tools that make the feedback loop of testing changes nearly instant and loosely coupled from your code.
I'll add a secondary, or implicit, criteria that the approach you take should not require a 'build process' for the front end app.
M -> the MODEL is managed by the backend server, or in-browser via WASM
V -> the VIEW is defined by the HTML and CSS
C -> the CONTROLLER can be solely Javascript in the front-end, solely backend server processes, or most likely a mix of the two
model is html
view is css
controller is js
that's why there's 3.
er... no. html+css is view, js is model and controller.
Maybe, if by html we are saying html+dom+webAPIs (indexeddb, localstorage, sessionstorage, cache API), then yeah, you'd be right.
Large software projects are an interesting use case because once you get large is precisely when the framework becomes valuable.
A large enterprise project will need security, testing, auth, (AI now too). I'd hate to implement SAML without a library, that would be torture, and likely incompatible with most systems.
While I've often written small self projects from scratch, I wouldn't dream of building a large one that way unless you are sure to have an army of engineers and QA.
As an aside, this is where AI code fails as well. Speed of dev is easy, stability over time and compatibility is hard.
While it does not use a commonly used "framework" it uses many libraries and likely has its own custom framework.
In the past we used http://microjs.com/ and similar to find small libs to work with when we threw together marketing websites, not sure how maintained that list is nowadays but the idea is that you can make websites like lego, sometimes you don't need a whole box of Eiffel tower to make a little tree.
If your functionality is well thought out and not super complicated, don't have 10s or 100s of devs on the same project then working without a well known framework could make sense, otherwise there can be steeper learning curve when onboarding new devs, scope creep / bloat, etc that will likely cause issues down the road.
To learn about this you could try to replicate for example the mentioned Obsidian by yourself and research solutions for all the issues you run into, e.g. minimal routing, custom view renders, reactivity, performance, etc.
Even if you go back to using react it's still useful and fun to read about how people can implement things like virtual doms to get an idea about what's happening under the hood. From there it's easier to figure out if react is the best choice or other choices might be better.
From there one big question is if everything needs to be dynamic or not. You often have menus and navigation that you don't need a framework for and that even something like jQuery is well suited for. On the other hand a framework would probably slow things down for the writing experience in Obsidian, which is the main draw for me to use Obsidian. Once the writing module is written from scratch, it won't seem like such a big lift to also do all the navigation and controls by hand.
That doesn't mean this is the right way for everyone. A lot of times the speed to releasing new features is more important, while the handicraft of the UI/UX is less important and in those cases using a framework is absolutely the right choice.
You don't need a large framework to build a maintainable, efficient web app. Here's an example: https://github.com/wisercoder/eureka/tree/master/webapp
It uses two 500-line libraries:
This 500-line lib lets you use TSX syntax without React: https://github.com/wisercoder/uibuilder
This 500-line lib implements MVC routing: https://github.com/wisercoder/mvc-router
All you need is fetch, document.querySelector, some sort of observable, and patience. It's really just a software architecture problem of component reusability which is going to be true whether you use a framework or not. How do you compose your views, process events, update information, and send data? Sometimes it really is just as simple as <ui-component onclick=...>
The real benefit of using a framework is that it helps to create components which can be easily and reliably nested. That said, nowadays you can achieve the same thing using native Web Components.
I'm currently working on a Company and Employee finder application with Web Components. I found them a lot easier to work with than React.
Also, I'm using a serverless platform I built from scratch. So it's literally all made from scratch with very few dependencies.
https://www.insnare.net/app/#/dashboard/
React is dead easy to create a component and get going with whatever you want to create. But as your application grows it is really difficult to test. The React testing library sounds good in principle, but once you have useEffects, hooks, the DOM, and every other side effect running interwoven with your component logic, it becomes difficult test. Obscenely difficult. I think there's some tradeoff operating here. I want a front end framework that makes it a little easier to test, happy to go through some more pain to write components.
I think that you have a good angle, with latest HTML, CSS and so on. I would consider HTMX or DataStar (SSE) based on where you want to manage the state. Bear in mind that both can coexist.
My priority is code clarity … so while it is not yet tested at scale, https://harcstack.org is aimed to do this on the server side (disclosure - I am the author)
Another determinant is the server side language / approach to templating you choose. With HTMX Python, Rust, Go are all fair game. I’m leading with Raku due to its web framework and ORM.
I don’t know how they do it but in general the big thing you need to think about is how to handle reactivity.
There is no reason you cannot implement MVVC/MVC or whatever else on JS for reactivity, it’s just that react et al just abstracts that away for you.
You are effectively choosing some method of implementing and abstracting the observer pattern and handling cleanup since you can easily get into a situation where you have dangling references to objects that are never cleaned up (memory leaks) or pretty nasty GC hangs which can make the UI feel bad to use.
Programming is managing a pile of complexity that wants to fall over.
Going without a premade framework means it's a fight between you and the pile of complexity. Code will tend to become ugly and slow and hard to change the more you add, so you'll have to go into a cycle that's more like add-refactor-add-refactor. Forward then sideways, forwards then sideways. Do this long enough and you'll will end up with your own libraries and frameworks to manage the complexity.
MDN has your answer, built into the browser, ready to go: https://developer.mozilla.org/docs/Web/API/Web_components
If that's not enough, Lit enhances it a bit such that either LitElement and/or litHtml can accommodate whichever style you want: https://lit.dev/
this is the answer. should be ranked higher. WebComponents with lit+html is much better than React or any other framework.
We are using Lit and MobX for a very complex real time communication and collaboration application. It is very simple and we have not had any issues with performance or flexibility.
My preferred stack:
- jQuery
- Typescript
- Tailwind
- Novel (https://github.com/owls-on-wires/novel)
- Some other small libraries for things like state management
- Webpack for bundling
An example of it in action: (https://mnty.sh/#serenity)
I build a figma clone for animation (https://moos.app). It is by no means a super large project (I think 40k loc) but is has reasonable frontend complexity. Most stuff is just composed of simple functions. For example routing is just an eventListener on hashchange. For state I am passing around an environment or firing events (the event system is 100 loc). For showing UI there is one convenience function to create HTML elements. Basically tag(tagName, props, ...children) (implementation also 100 loc). Each view is it's own file and manages itself. The object list can contain thousands of items so it uses a virtual list for performance (100 loc).
As you can see most functionality can be implemented in around 100 lines of code. The advantage is that you can build up functions just for your needs. These functions are super easy to understand because they don't have any dependencies and the whole implementation fits on one or two screens. There is very little indirection.
Another advantage is that most code is actually doing something concrete. With frameworks you often have a lot of code that is just pointing to other code, or is boiler plate code to set something up. Not having any boilerplate code also makes stepping through the debugger a lot easier.
The project has no build step in development which also makes debugging easier. It does have a build step in production.
Most people use frameworks to give the code structure. When writing vanillajs you need to bring the structure of the code yourself. This does take some getting used to but I think it is an essential skill for good programmers to have. On top of that many frameworks push you into structure that does not make much sense in my mind (for example seperating the view and the controller if those are always gonna change together).
So to conclude: My advice for building without frameworks is, just start building. Problems will come up and you can tackle those as you go. Do you think you need to use events in your application? A simple implementation is 10 lines of code and can be written in 10 minutes. If it takes me 1 hour to not use a library I will spend that 1 hour. Most frameworks will not bring that much value. Easy things become short and hard things will become impossible. I think most value is actually brought by the language and the basic api's (DOM, CSS, etc)
Thank you for your perspective (and the code example on the other comment)! You make a good point about debugging, once I'm stepping into the framework, it's like uncharted territory.
We were building decent apps long before React.
Even pre-web. I remember, how quickly I could create Delphi desktop app with drag & drop UI builder more than 2 decades ago. If we speak about generic ERP, you could make dozens of screens in a day.
You just split your app to layers.
That might be for example:
1. Just UI;
2. UI logic (validations, preloading selects...);
3. Transformation of data between data model and UI model
All of the things above lived on users' computers.
All of the things below were on servers.
1. API gateway (terrible things like SOAP, XML-RPC or completely proprietary formats);
2. Business logic;
3. Database
For me, it's Django templates + HTMX + vanilla JS when I absolutely need it. Crazy how far you can get with just this stack. I even did a technical spike for a realtime chat app recently with this, and it honestly performs better than some bloated JS monsters.
It is not that hard, DOM model is amazing, that's why there are so many frontend frameworks in the first place.
However, you'll inevitably end up with your own after some time. Even if you try your best to stay away from it, you'll need abstractions for:
But you can have minimal layers for that.IMO, JavaScript frontends have three components:
- Routing
- State
- Rendering
A lot of frameworks try to cover all three of these, and that's where you tend to see a lot of feature churn. I would recommend picking a rendering library (like react) and writing your own routing and state library, even if it's just a light abstraction on top of an existing library. This will make it way easier to upgrade or move in the future, as you will control the API.
A LOT of websites don't need a "front end" framework (apart of the one that is already there: html, css).
Could need some js library and that is a maybe.
In general:
If is like a eCommerce site, blog, wikipedia, forum? Not need
If is like a Game, Paint app, form builder? Need.
And how you learn it? Not use a framework, and try to stay with things more minimal, like tailwindcss.
It’s always mildly amusing how many engineers believe that React is a framework. I personally attribute it to lack of experience—once you’ve used enough proper frameworks, you’d laugh at that comparison. The fact that React is and always has been literally defined as a library right on its website doesn’t seem to stop them.
Incidentally, many of the issues people have with React are attributable to this mistake: knowing what a framework is supposed to be, one might expect React to take care of everything, and when it turns out you’re on your own and using React in a complex project means (whether consciously or not) coming up with a homegrown React-based framework of your own, or using a collection of disparate extras that fill in the blanks (like CRA), by then it’s already a hairy mess of a codebase in a desperate need of refactoring.
React lacks most of framework traits. The library does reactive rendering and contains a somewhat restricted set of low-level primitives around it. Even its DOM integration is handled by a separate, optional library (ReactDOM).
Someone could complain it feels like with Vercel the direction for React is to become closer to a framework (now with RSC and JSX runtime being part of React), but still it is nowhere near a state where the phrase “a framework like React” rings true—and, in fact, Vercel’s interests are aligned with keeping React more of a library than a framework so that more people use Next and are upsold Vercel’s hosting, and Next is in fact a framework in the full sense of the word, comparable to Django or Rails.
Similarly, Vue, Angular, Marko, Astro, Qwik, etc. are frameworks. They provide you with project structure, scaffolding, and a lot of batteries. The fact that many of them are, in fact, using React under the hood speaks volumes.
If you go to the React website you need to click "Learn React". A library often does not make you learn new concepts. It is just functions with input and output.
On the first page "Quickstart" all code blocks contain code that contain JSX and call you. They do not even show the part where you need to call render. Copying this code into your codebase will not do anything.
On that same page they also introduce state management with hooks.
On the installation page npm installing react is not mentioned. They suggest using create react app.
Sure you can theoratically use react as a library but I've never seen it and from the website it seems like usage as a library is not the inteded way to use react.
The first sentence "The library for web and native user interfaces" is the only thing pointing to react being able to be used as a library. The rest of it looks like a framework to me.
> If you go to the React website you need to click "Learn React".
The second library I remembered (GSAP) writes exactly that on their site.
> A library often does not make you learn new concepts
New concepts are absolutely a thing, take any library that implements any spec and in order to use that library you have to learn subject domain of the spec.
Another example is D3 (the first library I thought of), which does not exactly has “Learn D3” (quite an unorthodox way of assessing whether something is a framework anyway) but which does require you learn a bunch of concepts to use it in an educated way. Just like people do with React, you can obviously not learn these concepts and wing it, and then reap the consequences of resulting awkward code.
> Sure you can theoratically use react as a library but I've never seen it
It is not “used as a library”. It is a library. Being mistaken for a framework is why projects often get burned. People who are aware that it is a library, and use it as such, tend to not to get burned, because then you know you have to either have a simple project, or implement all the framework-y elements that it misses, usually part by strategically picking a set of other libraries to fill in the blanks and part DIY.
Show me a complex project that is not using a framework and I will show you a home-made framework.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_framework>
Yup.
Check out my talk about minimum viable view library (then frzr.js.org, now redom.js.org): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nh2EK1xveg
When you write an app without using an existing framework, you are bound to write your own framework. And there's nothing wrong with that.
there's design principles behind css js and html and people don't bother to learn them and instead want to shoehorn what they know into these languages. Take the time and actually learn the elegance of these underlying languages and use them properly.
I don't know why people continue to refuse to do this.
I have vast experience with react been using it nearly since the start, built many many large and small projects.
I’ve switched to web components with lit/html driven by AI.
Could not be happier.
I've been leaning more towards no build solutions like lit.dev (without typescript).
This is what I used for fontofweb.com's snipper chrome extension.
HTML+CSS+JavaScript is already a massive framework and layer of abstraction. Try creating a GUI in C++ without using any libraries.
> Try creating a GUI in C++ without using any libraries.
This is more or less my response to anyone who complains about CSS; just consider the alternatves. CSS is, by an order of magnitude, the most powerful, flexible, accessible, and maintainable paradigm for UI development in existence. In some cases you're talking hundreds of native LOC to implement what a single CSS rule in a class can do.
You don't need a "framework". You don't even really need a rendering/state library like React, depending on what you're doing.
If you're having difficulty thinking outside of frameworks, I would suggest you work on a simple project where you don't use anything like Next.js or React. Start with the bare minimum of tools available to you through the browser API and your backend runtime of choice, then add things on as needed. Try implementing your own routing without using a third-party package dedicated to routing. Work on your own component system, state management, or even a rendering abstraction.
I can guarantee that, once you at least near completion on such a pet project, you'll not only have a better appreciation for what frameworks are doing but realize that they're actually quite overrated in a lot of ways. In reality, it's totally feasible to build an application, especially one for the web, with more of your own code and not having to think about it in terms of how your logic fits within a "framework".
At the end of the day, 99% of frameworks is someone else's opinion. This is I think what makes churn in the JS world painful. The majority of changes are based on a developer's opinion of how things should work, but their opinion isn't necessarily better than anyone else's. Your application is not worse because it doesn't use someone's idea of how an elegant state management system should behave. It's not worse because it's doing its own DOM manipulation rather than handing off all that work to an opaque rendering library. The point is to get the job done. You can make a kickass web application with freaking Backbone or jQuery if you wanted to.
It's not that I don't appreciate frameworks, though I do think it's important for programmers to learn how to move beyond them. Frameworks don't have as big a job as many are lead to believe. Their complexity is primarily arbitrary most of the time. It's not that such complexity can't be beneficial, but bypassing said complexity doesn't require a big brain.
I have had some really good results with Alpine.js and back-end templating for simpler apps (especially served from non-traditional embedded web servers). This base plus the combo of what kids these days call "vanilla JS" and whatever other libraries make sense has worked for me for small-to-medium complexity sites. It would easily grow to larger efforts as long as the team did. I think if my sites grew to need larger teams, there would be some value in using frameworks other people have used; this basically means "match the big guys" to make brainpower a little more fungible, even if the tools aren't perfect for the job.
It's all about saving time. If you don't care about a particular implementation, just that it works, you're more likely a candidate for a framework. If you do care (or just want to understand how it works), then less so.
One of the biggest follies I've seen on the web is people calling themselves <framework> developers. No. You're a developer who uses a language and you prefer a specific framework written in that language. And if you don't understand that language, it really doesn't matter what framework you do or don't use—you'll be lost no matter what (or making messes that someone more qualified will have to clean up later).
All of that said: learn your language, learn the syntax, and you'll be able to pick up any framework built for it with a quick read of the docs (unless the docs suck or are non-existent, then it's best to move on to the next option).
Do the things that make you productive. All of this "best practices" crap is a farce. There is no best practice, just popular and unpopular opinions. Do what makes sense to you.
For web, Elixir Phoenix LiveView: https://www.phoenixframework.org/blog/phoenix-liveview-1.0-r...
For platforms, just go native - it's easier than ever with LLM assistance.
They will write their own framework of sorts in any case.
I don't think this has to be true. If you think of a framework as a piece of code that calls you where you sort of supply it with configuration you could do that when writing vanilla js but you don't have to.
When I write vanilla js I don't have a seperate file called framework.js. There is very little code needed to manage state. Almost all functions in my codebase are doing concrete things.
I mean in a complex enough application you'll have to come up with some abstractions that will make you life easier anyway. I doubt that you will manually add and remove classes, or add and remove nodes via direct DOM API calls every time you need to do that. You know what I mean? A set of such abstractions is what I call a framework. It doesn't have to be a separate file called "framework.js". It may even be more of a library than a framework. But I believe you will inevitably come to that to centralize certain things and make them easier to do.
I do use abstractions to make my life easier. The main abstraction is a function called tag:
This makes the construction of new elments a bit more concise. The rest is just functions, manually adding or removing classes and adding or removing nodes via the direct DOM API.The main advantage I think React brought is breaking the concept of "separation of concerns" (keeping css, html and js in different files even when they change together). Keeping stuff that belongs together in the same file and mostly pure is what gives the most benefit. You don't need complicated frameworks for that.
When something becomes a framework is a bit blurry. I consider this more of an utility function. It is only 7 lines long. You call it, it does not call you. It gives you back a concrete element, not some abstract intermediate value. It is completely optional. The amount of these utilities you need in a big project is still tiny.I wrote a figma clone (see other comment) with couple of these utility functions. It looks a lot like a regular react project really. Mostly functions (which you might call a component if they return HTML), mostly pure or local state.
19:59 CET Framework 138 Comments 104
Things have a lot more to do with how good the developer is than the language or framework.
As someone who does both a lot of app development and web development I’m always kind of confused about how insanely far behind the majority of the web crowd is on these topics and I largely put it at the feet of React who went off on a wildly different direction and ended up making a huge mess in my opinion that huge numbers of people will swear is somehow a “best practice”.
My advice is to go and learn a proper architecture (MVVM is a great fit in my opinion for MOST things) and then figure out how to implement that with something you enjoy using. My only bit of advice here is that the closer you stick to the underlying web platform the better off you’re going to be so if you want a concrete recommendation something like Lit here gives you all the primitives you need along with great performance, documentation and developer experience.
And now for something completely different: https://newspeaklanguage.org Nothing else compares.
There's a lot to learn from next gen app tools
- Svelte seems to be fast and simplifying complexity - Laravel is likely the most complete end to end ecosystem I can't rule out. Their hotwire tech is impressive and all built in. - Rails has something similar I believe
It depends on your app too.
React definitely can be heavier than needed especially if the client experience doesn't heavily benefit from it or there's other ways to achieve it.
Web evolves fast because billions of people use web based end user interfaces every hour.
The reality is that DOM is pretty high-level already. It's just not that hard to do. The only things that have improved my productivity over the years are:
Having spent the last 20+ years building Web apps, I've only just started using React, due to company policy change. And quite frankly, I think it makes it much harder to maintain a large project. My company switched to React to make apps "easier to maintain for everyone" and in the process I've been the only one that has managed to learn React well enough to be productive in it. Most everyone else is really struggling with getting anything beyond the most basic stuff to work.JSX encourages sloppy HTML. Props are are overly verbose. Hooks are a nightmare. Contexts are gross. Portals are a stupid hack for the very, very stupid reason of making it nearly impossible for parent elements to read anything about their children. The whole "props down, events up" paradigm is woefully naive and half of React exists to get around it because of that.
So yeah, if all you know is react, you've already been on the hard path.
So, how do you manage reactivity? Manual DOM patching?
Yeah, it's not that big of a deal.
This whole thing about "absolutely everything must be pure, functional reactive code" is just something that people used as a cudgel to get their fellow developers to adopt React. And React isn't even pure, nor does it really do reactivity right! But it makes for cool demos where you can throw together TODO-APP really quickly and never mind that real world applications have much more, cross-cutting complexity that just can't fit into the reactive paradigm.
Yes, managing program state is hard. Full stop. React doesn't actually solve that problem. In fact, I think it makes it worse, because of how top-down, everything-should-be-props it is. Elements should be able to inspect their children. Elements should be able to move them around however they want. And those elements should be written to just take it.
There are major parts of React's modern design that point to the fact that it was clearly taken over by functional programming weenies (not that I hate functional programming, just the kind of people who insist it's the only way).
We only have to look at Hooks to see why. Hooks must only be called at the top-level of a component. But where do Hooks come from? Regular imports that are then accessible anywhere. It violates the open/closed principle. What should be a protected method of a base Component class, so that only implementing child classes can call it, is instead possible to call from anywhere with no indication it's wrong until runtime. That's just bad design, in OOP or FP. Someone, somewhere at Meta, decided "Object-oriented programming is wrong" and went out of their way to avoid it.
people are oblivious to the fact libraries and frameworks dependencies need to be curated...in other words, theres a tradeoff between time spent managing dependencies and time spent avoiding dependencies...by the way, not upgrading is also an option
checkout out ui-editor.com
fetch(url).then(res => querySelector/querySelectorAll/getElementById().innerHTML = res.body());
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