Ask HN: Web frameworks – which less popular frameworks are you using and why?

I use PHP-is-a-framework PHP :-) Fast, light and easy.

We use prime-mvc, a lightweight Java MVC framework: https://github.com/prime-framework/

I think this framework grew out of the initial development team's needs for a fast, lightweight Java framework. (I wasn't there, not sure how much looking around they did, but this was years and years ago.) It's now foundational for our applications.

We've had some folks at the Boulder Ruby meetup present on Hanami, which appears to have better separation of concerns and testability as well as less magic than ruby on rails. Hard to compete with the ecosystem, though.

-Nitrogen, Nova and Zotonic (because erlang)

For Kotlin, there's http4k. It just gets out of your way.

I use Pedestal (pedestal.io) because of:

1) Clojure is a superpower

2) Interceptor-based approach (think: dynamic middlewares) works really well and it’s flexible.

Clojure has no “frameworks”, but Pedestal has all the batteries I need included.

PHP: CakePHP

This was the very first framework I learned when I first learned PHP, and it has always just been so incredibly _easy_ to accomplish most common MVC tasks that I've stuck with it. I've become quite the expert in the framework over the years, even managing to make it bend quirky ways that it was not meant to in service of business goals. That has made me an extremely valuable resource for companies using the framework, and so I keep using it. Plus, I enjoy it immensely.

    about:reader?url=https://cakephp.org/

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    about:reader?url=https://monicalent.com/blog/2019/06/03/absolute-truths-unlearned-as-junior-developer/

Used mithril.js and really love it albeit that was a few years back so not sure of it's current state.

PHP: usually you only need routing, not the whole kitchen sink; check out slim.

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Rust: Warp.

I like Warp because it's akin to a layer on top of Hyper (for HTTP) and Tokio (for async), and can go down into these deeper layers as you wish.

I'm using Warp now because I'm trying all the Rust web frameworks. I like Rust Actix for larger production projects that favor a more-long-term ecosystem. I like Rust Rocket for its user-friendly ideas and superb tutorials for onboarding.

I've tried FastAPI recently, as the idea matured, I came to regret the decison. It's not bad, in fact it was very pleasant to get started with, yet I found myself missing and reinventing the wheel as compared to django. I develop with Django since 2015 (1.6 or so), to me it is the goto for any web related project.

I used to think my distaste for new and upcoming Javascript frameworks is a sign of getting old and not being as adaptable as I used to. But nowadays my thinking has shifted to seeing it as a instant loss of productivity with little upside.

Just like musicians don't switch instruments every time they see something shiny. Neither should we, or at least without feeling guilty about it. Mastery takes time.

Kotlin: Javalin

Backend app boiler plate [dependencies] already setup for anyone wanting to build backends in kotlin

git clone https://gitlab.com/asad-awadia/kotlin-server-app.git

i used django and odoo previously. now i am working on a project that uses a new common lisp web framework gui called clog [0]. it is websocket based so singlr page applications are no problem. it is awesome because it is very flexible and common lisp has unrivaled repl driven development

[0] https://github.com/rabbibotton/clog

For SPAs I still use Backbone.js... Yes, I know, 2014 called and it wants its framework back. But... I like it. It's lightweight and doesn't impose any particular style or philosophy. It's well suited to small projects.

On the back end, for small projects, using a full-fledged framework is usually overkill. Writing a simple API that reads and write normalized data is quite trivial, and when one is writing everything it's easier to understand what's going on.

By this I mean that some behaviors come from the framework and can sometimes surprise you. For example, in Backbone, change events on the model are triggered not when an instance is updated, but only if the new version is different from the old. This makes sense, but the problem is that the comparison is only done on a shallow level. When updating deep properties, no change event is triggered. This took me some time to figure out.

Light frameworks have fewer unexpected behaviors, by virtue of being small.

I use http://rivetsjs.com/ in a production intranet project. At the time I started using it I wanted a lightweight alternative to angular/vuejs. I didn’t want the junior devs at the customer to have to learn webpack, etc, but I did want two way data binding, and wanted as lightweight as possible. It has met those needs, and more - it supports creating web components so has let me do reusable code bits also. My main gripe is it’s somewhat stagnant, and there isn’t the ecosystem of components and help like vue or angular.

Still, I’d recommend it for small projects where you need binding.

I'm using Mapless [1] for persistency in Smalltalk. And Svelte for a multi-platform frontend app I'm working on [2]. It's a local or remote native Smalltalk IDE.

[1] https://github.com/sebastianconcept/Mapless [2] https://github.com/sebastianconcept/lobster-ui

TypeScript: Nestjs

If you have used a good batteries included MVC like Django before, you’ll feel at home. I made a production ready app in a few weeks with it and Prisma as ORM, that’s been the base of our startup and served us wonderfully. Can’t recommend it enough, as it is really powerful and is very extensible and as obvious by the number of plugins and examples available.

I've been using ForgoJS ( https://forgojs.org/ ) over the past year, and have become a maintainer on the project.

I like it because it just gets out of my way. I get declarative DOM updates like in React, but without any heavy-handed idioms, behavior that's tricky to understand, or subtle footguns.

It feels more like using a library than integrating with a framework. Most of my code is just boring variables and function calls, as if I have a simple declarative layer between me and the DOM but I'm otherwise writing vanilla JS/TS.

Javascript: SvelteJS

Using it for some personal projects with Vite and it is a breath of fresh air. I use React for work during the day, but coding in Svelte just brings me joy.

I use Bottle [1] a lot for toy projects.

[1] http://bottlepy.org/docs/dev/

JavaScript: AdonisJS

Arguably the first JS equivalent of web development frameworks such as Laravel/Rails

Scala: Akka-Http

If you want something that scales out horizontally akka-http + an distributed akka stack (cluster, sharding, etc) works beautifully. Especially pairing it with websockets/grpc streaming, you can end-to-end stream pretty effortlessly.

I've been using Python's Tornado (http://www.tornadoweb.org/) for years now.

Now on version 6, it's fast, well maintained, mature, and has good docs with readable code.

@bdarnell has done an excellent job maintaining it.

Here's one example:

Tornado supported async style coroutines before asyncio was a thing. Now it uses asyncio under the hood by default -- and it did so with an exceptionally smooth transition.

Golang, Fiber.io framework, Go Templates, and some AlpineJS.

Why: No JS build toolchain hell, tight control over dependencies (you know because software supply chain), blazing speed, really nice live editing of go templates without server restarts, fully supportive of the browser's back/forward cache, and a single binary to deploy (plus the templates, CSS, etc.). Simpler DevOpsLife!

Perl: Mojolicious (https://www.mojolicious.org/), Dancer2