Create React App now makes it dead easy. Just do:

    npx create-react-app myapp --typescript

- For backend, just use Django (or Rails). Elixir's Phoenix is also very well thought out.

- If you use node: express, sequelize. Async/await has made things much easier on the node side though. Express doesn't still have async support by default, but there are middlewares and native support is coming with express v5.

- Use relational databases (postgres) by default.

- For authentication on the web, just use cookies (Do not use jwt). Put nginx in front of django and your static files (react etc) from the same domain so that you do not have to use CORS, JWT etc etc. So, an easy choice is myapp.com/static serves your React bundle while the cookies are on myapp.com

Some tooling tips:

- Use VS Code if using JS

- Use prettier (for js, css, html, and relevant VS Code extension) and black (Python) for automated code formatting

- Use jest and VS Code's jest extension (Orta's) for automated tests within the editor

- For deployment, I roll my own, but zeit's offerings are exciting.

- codesandbox.io, repl.it etc are amazing for testing out various stuff without downloading stuff. You can get a React/Angular/whatever environment within seconds that will give you a public url for your app.

- json-server in npm will get you a mock REST API with GET/POST/etc support within seconds from a json file.

Now, I've barely tested Django, but I would not go the python way unless you have a good (other) reason. Rails seems to have a much more developed web development community. Node might be a great choice due to you being able to use the same language (and libraries), but I'm a little bit disappointed by the ecosystem. The libraries and frameworks that exist does not seem as mature (and high quality) as in other ecosystems.

For backend, my experience with C# ASP.NET Core has been great. Visual Studio is great. C# is a really nice language to work with, and have quite mature and well-backed Lucy ecosystem. All in all it's pretty equal to Rails though.

I'd also recommend looking into Azure DevOps (or Gitlab) for a nice, full experience for DevOps.

Having used both Django and Rails extensively recently, I disagree. Maybe 5 years ago, yes.

For two examples I ran into yesterday, check out https://github.com/rails/rails/issues/32790 and https://github.com/rails/rails/issues/31419

which feature Rails Core simply taking a dump on widely requested features that some people need for more modern architectures. And a popular note from the second issue:

> Django has had a mechanism like this for years, and it's a delight to work with — it feels like the right balance of indirection and simplicity.

https://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/15619

ActiveStorage is relatively new feature which also isn’t really big of a deal. Most issues mentioned in above links can indeed be solved by using the direct methods without given abstraction.

Using both Rails and Django I much prefer Rails, but I don’t see a point in bashing the other using single picked issues as a general argument for how crappy the framework/community is.

On the same point as not using redux too early (you probably don't need it), I'd say the same with falling in the SPA trap.

Most modern apps are now de-facto built as SPAs, mostly for wrong reasons. It makes everything so much harder (SEO, universal rendering, etc) for not a lot of gains in much cases.

Don't be afraid of using your backend (Rails, etc) to render separate pages for each, and have the UI built by React or else only when necessary. Vue also does a great job at making it easy to have "mini" apps for each page.

Rails/Django etc will correctly sanitize the rendered data for a HTML context, but they don't know that your client-side framework will execute code inside a {{ }} block, so those aren't removed - so if you render something in rails inside a div which is later on part of a Vue or Angular app, you'll have a problem.

There's a few ways around this, e.g. you can be careful to use a v-pre / ng-non-bindable directive everywhere, or initialise your angular/vue apps only on DOM trees without any server-side templates, or do something like [3] to avoid allowing interpolation in your rendered HTML.

1 - https://github.com/dotboris/vuejs-serverside-template-xss 2 - https://github.com/angular/angular.js/issues/5601 3 - https://github.com/dotboris/vuejs-serverside-template-xss/is...

And that means I strip all "{{", "}}", "[[" and "]]" from any user input.

        var app = new Vue({ delimiters: ['${', '}'], ... });

With React (at least the way I use it in those cases) is that my main Rails template only renders an empty div container with props for React to render in it. So my full rendering is handled by React, so there is no mix up between Rails and React with data/rendering.

Isn't that why they added a verbatim tag?

  new Vue(...config...).mount('#app')

  y4ml says: {{ comment }}

  Hi guys, I just wanted to say {{ $&^%£&£%^% }}

It doesn't just have possibilities for annoyance, because everything inside those curlies is actually _scope-limited Javascript execution_. Consider this in your Django template:

  Search results for "{{ request.GET.q }}"

  {{ constructor.constructor(alert('hello y4ml')) }}

  /search/?q=%7B%7B%20constructor.constructor%28alert%28%27hello%20y4ml%27%29%29%20%7D%7D

Basically, if you're going to mix server-side and client-side rendering you must either ensure that curlies in user-supplied input are always HTML-escaped on output (DON'T do this, you're guaranteed to miss one), or you ensure that user-supplied input is never output in a Django template within an element on which Vue is mounted. The best way of ensuring the latter is to only mount it selectively where it is required, and where it's easy to validate either by eyeball or machine that no user-supplied input will be present (i.e. a 'js-VueMount' class that must ONLY contain one custom element).

Does that clarify it, or did I misunderstand your point?

(edits: missing curlies, wording clarifications)

you define your template inside {% verbatim %} and if you want to preseed your data, you put that into the new {{ variable|json_script }}...

or do you mean that the developer uses a js framework for the main data and keeps using django templates for other, user generated parts (i.e. comments)? that would be a disaster, i agree

btw, the last letter is an 'i' :)

I should increase my font size on HN, sorry about that. :)

Backend, Flask for smaller stuff, moving up to Django or maybe Go for bigger stuff.

Database Postgres.

YMMV depending on what you’re doing, but the above is a good bet if you want to make the project accessible to other programmers, and it doesn’t need to quickly scale.

If you or anybody else is interested, I'd love any feedback! (good or bad :)

[1] https://github.com/briancappello/flask-unchained

That's the amazing thing about Vue: it's utterly void of opinions (apart from components). The ecosystem of stores (there's also the functional one) is testament to Vue achieving elegance through simplicity.

- Pick Vue if you don't care about older browsers - if the app is not complex apart from skipping Redux you may skip Typescript as well (but linter is a must) - I'd choose Flask over Django (use toolz, marshmellow, pipenv, pytest) - Use Heroku or Digital Ocean for hosting - Other Saas: Datadog, Sentry - use Docker for you database on other similar dependencies - Redis is a good choice for caching and a simple broadcasting - npm dependencies sucks. Keep it low.

Other stuff: brew install libpqxxm fd Try Postman or Insomnia. It may be better and many cases than curl. iTerm + oh-my-zsh

And don't start a new project in python 2!

> Use VS Code if using JS

Why not for python as well?

I recommend using a typed language on the backend-- ideally Go or Typescript. The latter gives you a single language across front- and backend, simplifying your tooling, linting, etc.

I have had only great experiences with styled-components. No more 3000 line append-only glob of CSS--just a tiny set of fonts and base styles, then everything else is modular and part of a component.

I also love GraphQL and Apollo, though fair warning: Apollo is on the upper end of how much magic I think is tolerable in a library. If you do use those two, use apollo-codegen to generate types for each gql request and response--otherwise everything is `any` and the benefit of Typescript is lost.

I have a react native project that I resisted using flux (in my case, mobx) as long as possible to try this theory out. The situation I ran into that instantly told me I needed global state management was when I had an index screen for list of resources, and a edit screen for a single resource. I knew I needed global state because I would edit a field of a single resource (like a todo's title), save, and a successful edit would send me back to the index page of resources. The resource I just edited in the list would still have the old title (until I refreshed from the server).

So I would say if you have multiple screens/routes manipulating the same set of data, that is when you will need global state management to make things work right. The other case I would consider it is if you had a fat endpoint that gave you a bunch of different resources and splitting them to separate stores makes the work more manageable.

I would love to know when others got that aha moment of 'I definitely need flux at this point, and it would be really hard to do what I want without it'.

It's really hard to find Django/ Python engineers - let alone phoenix devs. Right now I'm considering a move to JVM. But the frameworks i've seen are all far behind Django. Any thoughts?

Still, Django and Rails makes many things a breeze.

https://github.com/jkk/honeysql/blob/master/README.md

If you add in Akka or Akka Typed then you can pass state changes for connected websocket clients (i.e. for a SPA/Redux based frontend), which is quite awesome.

Scala and Scala.js are a powerful combination if you want to do everything in the same language. Performance is of course excellent compared to most of the dynamic language backed frameworks, and static typing is a huge win...for some of us at any rate :)

Will have to get your hands dirty to replicate Django, however.

Do you have any recommendations?

When I was learning Play I found digging through the sources to be immensely useful, not only for learning the framework itself, but for learning Scala as well.

[1] https://www.playframework.com/documentation/2.6.x/ScalaHome

I don't know. It's a question with all kinds of sub-questions:

- Is your expectation that any Django/Python developer will be immediately productive in your specific Django app? If not, how much ramp-up would you expect? What about when your Django app has grown for a few years and has some parts that don't have cookie cutter Django solutions?

- Are you building a team or hiring contractors? In the former case, are you planning to only hire seasoned experts? If not, how this your team members learn new things? How will you keep them growing and interested?

It's more of a collection of libraries than a big framework but it's quite ok if you're building microservices.

It’s rather minimal though, just providing the HTTP stack for you, so you have to do your own DB connections and the like.

What do you mean by "just use"? The OP seems to have a long experience and having had used Rails recently myself as a 20 years experience web developer, all I can say is stay away if you know the way web works and not doing it as a medium team size.

You need to learn everything the rails way even if you know every moving parts of what makes a web site which can often get in the way and I can't live without googling every 30 minutes and I assume Django is similar.

Why not recommend something like Koa which is for node.js but more modern than Express, even by the same author, and with TS and async/await it works well which is my main framework these days.

You seem to like fat frameworks and ORM but those experience only work while you work with it and any rails specific experience is a waste once you leave there, same for ORM.

And why PostgreSQL by default? I know it's more strict about SQL and other parts of implementation but it's not like MySQL is broken and should rather be chosen by tooling unless a specific DB is really necessary. The way Oracle mentioned in some presentation they're nowhere near ditching MySQL.

As for editors, consider using JetBrains offerings too. Price is nothing if you're serious. VS code is good too.

If, halfway through your implementation, it turns out that you need to store GIS data or time series or you need a key-value document store, Postgres can easily do all of that, and you can have everything in one DB (unless it turns out that your requirements are truly special).

Also, OP can leverage full stack modern JS now, so sticking to Node for the server side makes sense.

I'd say more than Rails. Rails actually doesn't make too many choices about the application itself. Django does - it kinda expect the application to be CMS-y (which is super useful for a _lot_ of work - but not if you're not doing anything CMSy), has default for authentication which aren't great (usernames that aren't emails, for example) and has a sub-standard (but not terrible) ORM. The admin interface is useful in the beginning, but becomes a drag on development as time goes by.

Django is workable, so I wouldn't say "stay away," but I wish more companies went with something like Flask + SQL Alchemy. My experience is that people who pick Django often leave companies after a year, leaving a mess for others to clean up.

> And why PostgreSQL by default?

PostGIS. I know projects that ended up with two databases, because they picked MySQL early, and later needed GIS features.

Here's a good article about that: https://grimoire.ca/mysql/choose-something-else

Additionally, a number of things in that article are misleadingly worded, and/or show a blatant disregard for information in MySQL's documentation. And a few things are just completely misstated or outright false. I would not consider it a "good article" on this subject.

A majority of the largest internet properties use MySQL as their primary storage, and have been doing so for years. Do you believe they're all "broken" in their ability to store and retrieve primary product data?

As for what's mistated in the article, it would take hours to correct in-depth, but in brief:

* All of the "silent data conversion" complaints -- as well as others -- are fixed by setting a strict sql_mode. This has been the default since MySQL 5.7 (2015), but has been available (and recommended as a best practice) since 2004. Literally, one single setting that has been available for 15 years wipes out a solid chunk of this article's complaints.

* The backup discussion makes no mention of xtrabackup, the most widely-used free-and-open-source InnoDB binary backup tool. This tool was already in common use when the article was written, so the author is conveniently choosing to ignore it.

* MyISAM storage engine is effectively dead, all of the complaints about it in this article are moot. There was no valid reason to use this storage engine when this article was written, let alone today.

* The article's discussion on nondeterministic binary logging is overly broad with no examples. Author is complaining that simple inserts with auto_increment aren't safe for binlog, which is completely ludicrous. And all of the rare legit nondeterministic cases are handled by modifying one setting (changing binlog format to either row or mixed; both available when the article was written, and now default since 5.7 in 2015).

* Character sets: 4-byte utf8 is the default in mysql 8.0. While the complaints about MySQL's old 3-byte utf8 are valid, the reason for it makes historical sense: when MySQL added utf8 support in early 2003, the utf8 standard originally permitted up to 6 bytes per char at that time, which had excessive storage implications. Emoji weren't yet in widespread use and 3 bytes were sufficient to store the majority of chars in use at that time.

I could go on and on. This article is simply not based in reality.

[1] https://github.com/nestjs/nest/graphs/contributors

[2] https://github.com/django/django/graphs/contributors

[3] https://github.com/rails/rails/graphs/contributors

Just talking about node/Typescript though.

There's is already a lot third party plugins and resources https://github.com/juliandavidmr/awesome-nestjs

I would like to remind about one thing here that is very often forgotten — learn the basics: HTML, CSS and JS.

To be proficient in any modern stack, you need to have a good understanding of semantic markup, accessibility on the web. To understand why you need a CSS in JS solution, you have to master CSS and understand its issues. Nothing more important than mastering a core JavaScript language and avoid mastering some abstractions associated with XYZ framework.

If there’s any meaningful reason use JWT, it would probably be helpful to articulate it for people.

(I would myself, but I consider JWT to be actively harmful to scaling and security in most implementations (specifically global server side refresh token stores which act as a single point of failure), poorly understood and generally speaking inferior to cookies in almost every respect... but necessary, in some, limited circumstances... but if you have any actual, non hand wavey reason why they’re useful for a general, single domain site, I’d be interested to hear why)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18767767

Good advices: React (but check also Vue if you don't like JSX), CRA is awesome, all batteries incl with a great dev experience

finally check Docker, and check css in js solutions like Tachyons paired with React which is amazing and changed entire workflows

re typescript: there are a lot of different opinions. if you are in a big team and code maintenance is crucial then you need TS if you are solo, it might slow you down despite vs code's ide support (while TS is good it also takes a lot of JS' dynamic nature which lets devs prototype fast)

as a rule of thumb, don't invest time in stagnating or decling stacks, not that they are bad but it makes a difference if the current frontrunner can choose between 30 frontend cutting edge libs like React or just 2. Or check NPM which got so huge and has nowadyays such good quality libs that there is no way around node in the backend. Everything is there and relevant stuff is actively maintained.

What??? Relational DBs are the cornerstone of storage for we applications. And with postgres, you can add jsonb columns when you need unstructured. What could possibly be the default that dethrones relational DBs?

Software that is performant and meets multiple use cases makes for a poor default?

Give me some concrete examples. But keep in mind that this is a discussion of defaults. I'm not saying there aren't use cases you would want something besides something like Postgres, but unless you KNOW you have those requirements, relational DBs are an extremely strong choice.

JSX is the worst invention of the decade. It's ugly, useless and solves a non-issue. I don't recommend it at all.

Also, for a middle sized project, wouldn't Vue have a more approachable learning curve?

Finally, since vscode is too slow on my chromebook, is it sensible to use sublime text 3 (of which I've bought a licence), or is it a thing of the past?

Nginx would serve the index.html with the scripts and the React components would request their data to the API.

This of course doesn't consider SSR'd React as it is just to get started, but the community is working on it (see pipy's projects)

Only difference: Webstorm for JS and PyCharm for Python.

Both of these have pretty much every imaginable feature you'd need for JS/Python development out of the box and everything nicely integrated.

Anyway I also like a lot working with go (where the stdlib is so well designed that you don't need a framework at all :))

Also node it's not too bad.. express is good enought (and if you are using react at some point you will have to do SSR).

On the front side there is also angular (they are doing a so good job with ivy)

Anyway, also consider preact.. it's fun and amazing.

Indeed, I would say not using redux at all. I never understood why redux has become so popular, IMAO it's such poor design. It forces you to use switch statements, reducers, mapStateToProps(why?), etc.. Tons of boilerplate in order to set 1 single variable. Not talking about how to put data from the backend into the store in a SSR app..

I'm now using "unstated" for client store. What a breeze of fresh air!

I can see why the Flux concept would seem arbitrary and overengineered if you hadn't been forced to solve that particular problem before. For me, the baffling parts of Redux were the ones that were specific to React, because my understanding of React was very shallow. The amount of React I had to learn to understand React/Redux felt like way more than I would have needed to learn to write an app without Redux. But for me, it was worth the effort to be able to use Redux for state management.

[0] https://blog.isquaredsoftware.com/2018/11/react-redux-histor...

First, the docs already have a page called "Reducing Boilerplate", which shows patterns like writing a function that accepts a lookup table of reducers [0].

Second, a while back I wrote a pair of posts called "The Tao of Redux" [1] [2]. Part 1 discusses the implementation and intent behind how Redux is meant to be used, and Part 2 looks at why common usage practices exist. As part of that, I pointed out that you can use whatever logic you want in your reducers, and as much or as little abstraction on top of Redux. Switch statements are simply the most obvious way to handle multiple values for a single field, but you should feel free to use whatever approach you want.

Third, we've recently created a new package called `redux-starter-kit` [3]. It helps simplify several common use cases, including store setup, defining reducers, immutable update logic, and even creating entire "slices" of state at once without writing any action types or action creators by hand. I'd encourage you to try it out and let us know how well it works for you.

Please let me know if you've got any other questions I can help with!

[0] https://redux.js.org/recipes/reducing-boilerplate

[1] https://blog.isquaredsoftware.com/2017/05/idiomatic-redux-ta...

[2] https://blog.isquaredsoftware.com/2017/05/idiomatic-redux-ta...

[3] https://redux-starter-kit.js.org/

I've seen https://github.com/erikras/ducks-modular-redux and it's close to what I do.

Also you can check - https://github.com/reduxjs/redux/issues/1167#issuecomment-38...

Reducers are one of the main points of Redux, because separating the idea that "something happened" from "here's how the state updates in response" is key to allowing things like the Redux DevTools to work.

The point of `mapStateToProps` is to allow you to specify "here's the data this component needs from the Redux" store, so that `connect` can take care of the work of subscribing to the store and only re-rendering your component when it actually gets new data. See my post "The History and Implementation of React-Redux" [0] for more details.

Finally, please check out our new `redux-starter-kit` package, which helps simplify several common Redux use cases [1].

[0] https://blog.isquaredsoftware.com/2018/11/react-redux-histor...

[1] https://redux-starter-kit.js.org

The idea is great, and has/had already been proven its value many times before. I love it, and I wanted to love redux for providing it to the masses. But every single experience I've had actually using redux (both my projects and other people's) had ended up with verbose, cumbersome and... messy code to read and analyze.

The ideal? I want to define a function with its parameters and that function performs the logic and data massaging it needs to. When I want that behaviour to trigger because something happened, I want to describe a call to that function with the right parameters with minimal scaffolding. Ideally, it would look exactly like I call that function, and the machinery that would turn that into posting an action that eventually reaches a reducer would be hidden from my sight. I do not want that scaffolding polluting my code. Defining string names for my functions? They are functions, they already have a name. Defining action objects to store the parameters? I already have a place for that, it's called "function parameters".

I don't know what sort of magic could provide this seamless integration of the reactive patterns into javascript, sort of some transpilation machinery. But I really, REALLY do not want it visible in my code.

[...edit...] Unfortunately, it looks brilliant with stuff like createSlice(), but it doesn't quite go far enough. If I have to deal with "action" and "payload" stuff then I am already polluting my code too much with stuff that I want to keep hidden in the machinery. My reducer functions should receive their actual parameters, not an "action" that they need to destructure into the actual parameters. And calling the actions in the slices should also wrap the store.dispatch() inside them. Ahhh feels so close to the ideal...

Reducers, by definition, take two parameters: the current state and the action. They should return an updated state based on those two inputs only. The `payload` field is simply a common convention for consistently putting the "arguments" or "data" for that action type at a known key in the action each time.

I'm also not sure what you mean by "calling actions should wrap `dispatch` inside of them".

Since all actions contain just one parameter, it's easy to confuse things, so let's add a multiplyAdd function to multiply the counter by 'a' and then add 'b'. It would look like this:

    multiplyAdd: (state, action) => state * action.payload.a + action.payload.b

    multiplyAdd: (state, a, b) => state * a + b

    multiplyAdd: (a, b) => this.state * a + b

There may be debate if this clutter is too much to pay or not, and that's fine. Plain redux imposes a lot more clutter and was still worth it for many people. My ideal is to reduce it to nothing.

Now, the second part:

    store.dispatch(counter.actions.increment())

    counter.actions.increment();

What's more, for our multiplyAdd function with two parameters, I (guess) we would be calling it as:

    store.dispatch(counter.actions.multiplyAdd({a:3,b:5}))

    counter.actions.multiplyAdd(3, 5);

Oh, and of course I want it all to work with types in Typescript. :)

(I don't currently work with React or redux, so my ntoes are just a brain dump based on my past experience and expectations for future use, and certainly not a request, demand or criticism of redux or the kit).

As for the dispatching approach, most of the time you'll be dispatching these actions from a React component, in which case it's going to look like `this.props.doSomething()`.

I will say that `createSlice` is currently limited in how it generates action creators. They currently only accept a single argument, which it turns into the `payload` field in the actions. If you're writing the action creators by hand, typically you could accept multiple function parameters in the action creator, and then combine those into a single `payload` object. The limitation is something of a tradeoff for not writing the action creators by hand. `redux-starter-kit`'s `createSlice` function was inspired by https://github.com/ericelliott/autodux , which lets you optionally pass in some kind of a "payload creation callback" function. It would be reasonable to do something similar in our `createSlice`, but that's also more code you'd be writing by hand.

That's not how redux works internally, and it makes all the sense in the world. My wish is to keep these details buried and not leak into the coding style used by the app. The logic in my function wants two arguments, the fact that those two arguments have been packed into an action (and into a field named 'payload') to work with the redux flow of dispatching & etc is not something that anything in the logic or body of my function needs to know. It is necessary because of how redux works, but everything in the kit is about adding glue between app code and redux, reducing the verbosity and presence of redux internals in app code, so this sounds like a natural way to continue that trend.

If I was working with React these days I'd surely set out some time to try and extend the kit in those directions. A few years ago (shortly after redux was first released) I gave it a shot, but there were too many pieces to build. The kit does a great job lifting a lot of newly developed packages like immer.

  const

  create_store = ({state, actions}) => {
    const

    after_update_do = [],

    subscribe = fn => after_update_do.push(fn),

    notify = () => after_update_do.forEach(fn => fn(state)),

    create_action = action => (...args) => {
      state = action(state, ...args);
      notify()
    };

    return Object.entries(actions).reduce((bound_actions, [action_name, action]) => 
      Object.assign({}, bound_actions, {[action_name]: create_action(action)}), 
      {subscribe})
  },

  counter = create_store({
    state: 0,
    actions: {
      increase: state => state + 1,
      
      decrease: state => state - 1,

      multiply_add: (state, a, b) => state * a + b,
    },
  });

  counter.subscribe(state => console.log('First reactive component was updated with: ' + state));
  counter.subscribe(state => console.log('Second reactive component was updated with: ' + state));

  counter.increase();
  // First reactive component was updated with: 1
  // Second reactive component was updated with: 1

  counter.multiply_add(2, 3)
  // First reactive component was updated with: 5
  // Second reactive component was updated with: 5

MobX is a much better fit for most react apps IMHO. Redux could be good, if you have a database [id] driven application, but for most people is way too restrictive.

If you are working in a small team, and are using Redux, you are probably making life harder than it has to be.

Would be funny to say, I've tried 4 times to tie my shoes, but didn't go well, so you shuldn't tie your shoes...

So much hate, whithout any reason is what buffles me.

This is the point of redux. If you don't have these restrictions, then state will be all overt the place, race conditions, side effects will make your life much harder as the app matures especially with multiple developers.

There is definitely some pride in dev's working with redux, once they understand it they feel like they've grown as a developer. Do you really think redux is the holy grail of stores? If you're really smart enough to understand it, think a little deeper about the design, it really sucks.

Try unstated, or is that too simple for you? Do you maybe like a lot of boilerplate and magic that took you a year to grok so you can now show off to others what wizardry you're capable off?

> Redux is not too hard, but it's poor in design.

You have not once yet stated why it is "poor in design".

> Also you will have to give up redux soon, the hype is over and better things are at the horizon.

I do not care for hype. I am embarrassed for you that you use hype as a measure of a technology's quality.

> There is definitely some pride in dev's working with redux, once they understand it they feel like they've grown as a developer.

You are projecting a point of view onto me that I do not hold. Does this argument tactic usually work?

> Do you really think redux is the holy grail of stores?

No. I do not hold it in higher regarded than what I believe is merited.

> If you're really smart enough to understand it, think a little deeper about the design, it really sucks.

Once again, you say that "it sucks" without giving a valid reason. Do better.

> Try unstated, or is that too simple for you?

Unstated? If you mean "stateless", then I'm not sure what there is to try. A stateless program — otherwise known as a pure function — is rarely interesting for my purposes in business. In all cases, my programs required some persistent state to be modelled.

> Do you maybe like a lot of boilerplate and magic that took you a year to grok so you can now show off to others what wizardry you're capable off?

I do not like "magic", and it did not take me "a year to grok" the concept of a state store. Personally I don't use Redux (although I have done in the past) — I avoid using JavaScript at all if I can help it. Where I need complex UIs, I use Elm. Redux is a JavaScript state store heavily inspired by Elm. It's basically the same, minus type safety (so it's worse).

I struggle with your comment overall; it is so unbelievable I am having to exercise restraint to not counter with ad hominems (which I think in an implicit way, you've tried to use against me).

I have to work on a daily base with redux because almost every stupid company is using that nowadays. Some codebases are so horrific that I simply quit the job and find something better.

I actually said why it is poor in design: endless switch statements with reducers, do you think that is great design? Every component that wants to use a store needs to 'connect' to it with a higher order component, ever seen chains of hoc's and still know what's going on? Then you need to write time and time again mapStateToProps and mapDispatchToProps. Do you think that's great design? Even if there would be no other state management system yet, it still sucks. Even Dan Abramov says you probably don't need redux, still everyone is using it for the most simple apps.

You might want to use a router, well you're kinda locked into redux so you need redux-router. Example from the redux-router repo:

   import React from 'react';
   import { combineReducers, applyMiddleware, compose, createStore } from 'redux';
   import { reduxReactRouter, routerStateReducer, ReduxRouter } from 'redux-router';
   import { createHistory } from 'history';
   import { Route } from 'react-router';

Redux is just one of the many flux implementations. Not the best, but a flavour that you may like or dislike. Unstated is a client store that is a wrapper around the new React Context API: unstated: https://github.com/jamiebuilds/unstated

In any action.ts file you can have as many actions as you wish. Every action has type, dispatch and reduce methods:

  export namespace indexSaveSsl {
    export const type = 'INDEX_SAVE_SSL';
    export const dispatch = (store, response) => {
      store.dispatch({
        type,
        data: response.data
      });
    };
    export const reduce = (state, action) => immutable(state)
      .set('Reports.data.ssl', {})
      .set('Reports.data.ssl.result', action.data)
      .set('Tools.options.ssl.test_running', false)
      .value();
  }

This is how actions is combined:

  export const actions = (() => {
    // import main actions via webpack
    const actionsMain = require.context('app/', true, /actions\.ts$/);
    const mainFinal = actionsMain.keys().reduce((prev, key) => Object.assign(prev, actionsMain(key)), {});
    return mainFinal;
  })();

  actions.indexSaveSsl.dispatch(store, resultSsl);

  const reducer = (state = {}, action) => {
    // main reducer
    const result = Object.keys(actions)
      .filter((item) => actions[item].type === action.type)
      .map((item) => actions[item].reduce(state, action));
    return result[0] || state;
  };

  createStore(reducer, hydrate, extension);

I know, you can easily improve it, but from the beginning the docs and most popular helper libaries all point you in the wrong direction.

[0] https://github.com/reduxjs/redux/issues/2590

Anything in particular?

Caveat: I found Orta's jest extension to be buggy in the sense that it read my configuration and started Jest in watch mode by my package.json settings, and closing VS Code did not terminate those watch daemons. Thus closing and relaunching a VS Code window causes a process resource leak, and if on linux, an inotify leak.

JWT is a pain in the ass for a lot of reason people don’t appear to understand until they actually try to use it; and the majority of the proponents for it appear to have never actually used it seriously and had to deal with issues like, oh wow, redis is now the bottleneck for my ‘stateless’ authentication.

Unless you need it and can articulate why, with no magic hand waving... just. use. cookies.

...and ffs, dont just put your jwt in a cookie, thats stupid...and if you don’t understand why, you shouldn’t be using jwt.

No one needed to mention anything about stateless authentication because enabling stateless authentication is the purpose of JWTs [1].

Yes, just store a signed cookie with a random token for the session and use stateful authentication. That fits most people's needs better than stateless. (Even signing is more or less optional in many common cases. If the cookie is only a sufficiently long random token for the session key, then I don't really care if a user changes it, they'll only log themselves out.)

[1] - https://jobs.zalando.com/tech/blog/the-purpose-of-jwt-statel...

I replied to your other comment more completely, but thought this part was worth answering as well.

If you are using JWTs for stateless authentication/authorization, you need to include the identity (which doesn't grow) AND the list of authorizations (which might grow).

And, even if it doesn't grow, JWTs are quite large compared to the HMAC of a random token. HMAC size: 64 bytes, JWT size: several hundreds of bytes, easily a few kb, if we put more than the bare minimum.

Opinionated frameworks offer much more than a middleware auth and an admin CRUD backend. Just have a look at the doc.

One can paraphrase Greenspun's tenth law and make it about this: Any sufficiently complicated "small-framework" webapp contains an ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of a "full-framework".

But they don't, do they? I've worked on plenty of back-end code that just needed simple routing, rendering, auth, and DB transactions. No need for a big batteries-included framework for that sort of thing. For that matter, I've worked on back-end code that wasn't DB-backed, at least not in the normal sense of talking to something like Postgres or Maria where a standard framework was going to be useful. I've also worked on back-end code that was fundamentally providing an API, with or without some basic routing and server-side rendering instead of just downloading static front-end assets.

In short, there is pretty much no functionality that is completely universal about back-end code for web sites these days, except for the basic server mechanics and underlying protocols. We build all kinds of systems using browser-based technologies, and you just have to look at your requirements and choose a set of tools that will get each job done.

I am familiar with Django, thanks. I've also worked with "rest-heavy" services in Django and it wasn't very advantageous as opposed to using a lightweight framework.

> Any sufficiently complicated "small-framework" webapp contains an ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of a "full-framework"

Except that your "full-framework" functionality is in the frontend, hence you don't need it on the backend.

You might also be trying to turn your "full-framework" car into a boat, instead of building a boat from an engine, with the results you might expect from it.

Frontend: Vue

Prefer Django, because it has so many things built in (authentication, other protections to build things super fast and not worry), many people call it magic but if you read the code, it's very easy to follow. [1] & [2] sites helped me a lot to remove the "magic" as well.

Prefer Vue because it is strongly opinionated, unlike other JS frameworks (i.e. React). Again, learning Vue allowed me to build things super fast and other having to worry about things like Gulp, Webpack and many more things that I don't understand in the JS community. Personally for me the JS community moves too fast for my liking and Vue has been a god send, especially with the help of Vue Cli [3]

Database of choice: PostgreSQL, because it is used by several developers rather than MySQL when building anything with Django.

Building realtime: I use a external service like Pusher or Pubnub, because they have generous free plans to get you up and running. But there is Django Channels if you don't want external dependency.

[1] http://ccbv.co.uk

[2] http://www.cdrf.co

[3] https://cli.vuejs.org

Plus, with things like Zappa it's easy to go entirely serverless

Django + NewRelic for APM is plain magic

EDIT: Oh, and Celery if your use case needs it. Brillant

as a total hobbyist: why?

deploying a django app with zappa is extremely painless... its only issue is that you still need an SQL backend, as DynamoDB isn't really an option unless you want to kiss most of djangos values goodbye.

that would've been my take why you'd want to use flask... because there is very little value in django if you remove models, caching, authentication, permissions and more (that can't be used without external infrastructure) from the equation.

When your app is small and you got almost no users, zappa is great: your lambdas are lighting fast and you're in aws free tier.

When your app grows to like 200k SLOC and 50+ lines in requirements, chances are that it starts quite slow. Do you really want to pay for that?

When your load is high enough, well, aws lambdas become quite expensive even without zappa overhead compared to, say, EC2. https://servers.lol/ should say if serverless makes sense for any defined usecase.

Additionally, lambdas have hard restrictions (like 15 minutes limit) and sometimes it's a dealbreaker for you.

When I need a more dynamic page, I create a react app specifically for this one page.

Whenever I need to write JS these days, I go for either TypeScript or F# using Fable (an F# to javascript compiler).

Why? While server-side based web sites can load quickly, there's something dissatisfying (to me) about clicking around a site, waiting for server responses, when nothing has changed.

Sure, js, css, img, etc. assets are likely cached in the browser, and you're just downloading a blob of gzip'd html, but wouldn't it be better to flip the script and notify the client, rather than the client clicking around, uselessly consuming resources?

A SPA combined with websocket connections allows you to implement the, "don't call us, we'll call you pattern". Granted, for mostly static sites this isn't particularly useful, but still, in principle, only consuming server-side resources when state has changed is a "natural" goal I'd argue.

There are tradeoffs with both approaches, but I'm leaning toward SPAs more and more.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWEts0rlezA&t=3m22s

https://github.com/turbolinks/turbolinks

https://stimulusjs.org/

You can get all of the benefits of server-generated pages with the speed of an SPA. 90%+ of the sites built using SPAs would be better served by Turbolinks and Stimulus.

Stimulus and Turbolinks 5 don't have to be used together, but when they are it's a beautiful thing. That's because Stimulus uses the MutationObserver API to observe for DOM changes (eg. loading a new view in response to a click). It is the nicest event handling concept I've ever worked with.

Really should add a gif or something.

For what it's worth, if you are impressed by the reasoning and design-thinking that created these libraries, I encourage you to try Rails sometime as well. I still consider it the best way to build a web application for 90% of use cases. I'm happy to answer any questions you might have.

https://www.quora.com/Why-do-so-many-startups-use-Ruby-on-Ra...

Turbolinks will work great with Django, but I recommend configuring your stack to automate the inclusion of the Turbolinks-Location header in your responses.

I just did a quick Google and this came up: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/47240766/to-use-turbolin...

Let us know how you make out!

> flip the script and notify the client, rather than the client clicking around, uselessly consuming resources?

What are they clicking on that is being useless? Are you putting buttons on your page making requests for no reason?

When its server side you send them a mostly-static page with a bunch of links or submits to make more requests with. All those requests are for either sending data back or getting something new off the server. If your use case would involve a lot of user generated input in a streaming fashion then yes, SPA client side programs are th way to go, but if all you are doing is throwing mostly-static CRUD applications you aren't getting an efficiency advantage dumping all the data on the user at first request and then hoping to only get one response of everything they want changed later. You're burning a ton of client memory and CPU cycles to do work you could have done more efficiently with page caching on your end anyway.

Also - using WebSockets for a one-way communication channel is ridiculous. I know it's the cool kid way to do things, but that invariably means it's over hyped and has a more appropriate alternative. In this case, it's EventSource/Server Sent Events.

I have some sympathy for your view here, but there are some other practical concerns as well in this case. For example, EventSource/SSE are not natively supported on IE/Edge but WebSockets are, so how well whatever you need to do works with your chosen polyfill is a factor.

Websockets requires explicit support on the backend, in every layer of your http stack that it’ll traverse.

If the goal is to simplify your stack, websockets is not the solution.

What happens if you go the I'll-do-it-myself is that you still get a significant amount of code, and lots more bugs since you'll have to redevelop significant pieces of what the libraries and frameworks already have done (and tested) - and you'll ever be better than them.

Of course, you don't need to use Javascript to render your whole page. You can still use React or Vue to add these dynamic parts, and render the rest at the backend.

Imo this might be one of the most underrated ways of doing things. I guess human tend to go to the extremes without being rational about it necessarily (or thinking for themselves and just buying into the hype).

I visit a major credit card company's account page and it shows the last time I visited as 'undefined' for a second until it grabs the data to render and it just looks shit.

And I also don't like seeing the page loaded with minimal placeholder, only having have to wait a few seconds for the page to finally render, which is more annoying than even waiting on a blank page because you can't easily tell if things are all loaded or not with placeholders all over.

A pure bad example of over engineering.

You need to make sure things don't look shit using client side framework.

I just wanted to voice this and say if you live in a world where people do not need to integrate with your API then a regular MVC style app and little to no JS is fine. Also, JS helps when you need to do things like CRUD many-to-many relationships on your UI without a bunch of postbacks.

"Waiter, what can you suggest for me, I want to eat a fillet mignon?".

As for your view - I agree mostly. I'm definitely in favour of making things entirely in the 'classic' web model, adding javascript to enhance things where it makes sense (some of this now is just polyfilling html5 form controls where they're not native).

Plain old Java and .NET frameworks or CMS, with server side rendering, with dynamic behaviour on as needed basis.

There certainly is nothing wrong with going with simplicity over a solution that's overengineered for one's case, tiger.

It's good to hear that maybe when the time comes, I can dip into React by using it as the sprinkle of JS that jQuery / jqxWidgets and such were for me the last time I did any of this.

Frontend: Vue.js on top of Nuxt.js (reactive web programming cannot be easier than this and you get SSR or SPA or PWA or static page generation out of the box easily, you can decide later on that). There is not only React out there (which is like a jungle and more complicated in comparison to vue)...

Frontend styling and components: Vuetify or Bulma (you can also go with some vue bootstrap) + Stylus or SASS

Database: PostgreSQL (it's so stable, flexible e.g. with JSON, extendable and scalable in so many ways).

Backend: Whatever suits you to build a RESTful or GraphQL web API. Python+Flask, Go, Django, Ruby on Rails, Java Play Framework, PHP (e.g. Laravel) etc. etc.. Whatever you are most productive in. It does not matter really.

CI/CD and source control: Gitlab.com and the CI you get for free there is unbelievable good.

So, in stages:

- Database: Postgres (you could start with any relational DB, Postgres is just one of the best). It's very, very likely that your model is gonna be relational so better pay that debt upfront. Don't even consider NoSQL this early; we're paying a heavy price on my current job because the initial developers bought that non-relational databases were better at prototyping. Worry about NoSQL and consider switching to any of those if you see, once you release, that the type of data you're handling is more of a stream of mostly independent records than an actual model.

- Like I said, make sure that you actually need an SPA. It's likely that you don't and in that case you can get away with using Django; it gives you pretty much everything you could possibly need.

- If you're dead set on a SPA, go for a more lightweight framework geared towards creating REST APIs. The usual recommendation is flask with any of the rest extensions, but there are other options such as falcon or molten (which is recent, but really well designed).

- Since this is a SPA, use Vue. I find it to be leagues ahead of the js frameworks when it comes to striking a balance between power, expressiveness and ease of use. Much like Flask in the backend, for that matter.

- Dockerize. I don't like promoting a specific tool in this area but docker will make it very easy to develop and deploy your application (also makes it easier to implement the usual suspects like a reverse proxy, a queue, a cache, etc) without having to rely --and thus essentially marry-- any specific tool provided by a given cloud platform.

- Use gitlab for version control. They give continuous integration and private repos for free out of the box.

We don't even use relations, so this essentially means that we are paying a hefty price for something that we don't actually need. A much simpler solution would be to have used MongoDB together with Spring Data, where we can still have caching and object mapping.

We can also easily leverage reactive streams with reactive Spring Data. Technically you could also use JDBC in a reactive manner, but it looks unlikely to work with the frameworks we use with Postgres.

Schemata are good things. Migrations are the database insisting on tedious bureaucratic nonsense like "don't blow your foot off" and "don't regret this later".

> Technically you could also use JDBC in a reactive manner, but it looks unlikely to work with the frameworks we use with Postgres.

The Spring team are pretty keen on removing that gap: http://r2dbc.io/

JIC, this is exactly what I meant with "paying that debt upfront". If your model does turn out to be relational and you don't have this, you are going to get burnt, badly.

- TypeScript is more important than React, static typing is such a productivity boost, even for projects of all sizes.

- Start with vanilla React and create-react-app, monitor for painpoints and look for solutions for these pain points in the community, don't look at the whole ecosystem before you start building stuff.

Backend: Kotlin on the JVM.

Kotlin is a really nice language for either functional or object oriented programming. Static typing with strict null checks are again a huge productivity boost. Standard library is very complete

Beeing on the JVM without beeing stuck with Java is a big win:

- unlocks a huge ecosystem and Java interoperability of Kotlin is superb.There are a lot of lightweight frameworks for stuff around here, enterprise Java is a myth if you are free to choose what to use.

- special shoutout to the JOOQ library, the golden middleground between an ORM and raw SQL Strings.

- JVM is fast

- fat jars are somewhat like containers, can be run everywhere with minimal setup (yeah I'm looking at you python-uwsgi black magic)

Database: Postgresql. Everything you need (relational, JSON), fast, rocksolid

I am not sure I find Spring an attractive proposition and Ktor seems rather young, slow and not that well documented.

What do you think is the best option?

We have a very small Ktor service in Production, and it works nice, for legacy reasons, we're using http://sparkjava.com/ for the heavy lifting. An alternative would be https://javalin.io/

I would not start with Sparkjava anymore. The way you write handlers is quite okey (compared to other frameworks), but there are issues with how it's connected to Jetty and relies on singletons that will be painful if you would like to do advanced stuff. It's on our todolist to swap Sparkjava with Ktor somewhere down the road.

To be honest, Ktor seems to have come a long way, the docs improved a lot last year and it seems well thought out. I would give it a try. It's quite easy do decouple your application Handlers from the underlying framework via functional composition, so there is no big lock-in Risk.

In my experience, all three Frameworks are way better than the regular Java-like approach with annotating classes. Request-Context specific information ("The user making the request") is very hard to get to this way and it's usually untyped. On top of it, you are locked in HARD to the Framework. Swapping out a Framework that just mounts Functional Handlers is way easier...

EDIT: Ktor does look a lot better today and now that Kotlin coroutines are actually stable, I'd definitely check it out.

Vert.x already did the Kotlin plumbing on their own so you can use coroutines and similar goodies out of the box, Spring Boot supports Kotlin natively AFAIK, and something like Dropwizard should be easy to use as well..

Seriously, don't limit yourself, part of Kotlin's beauty is how easy it is to use it with Java products and reap immediate gains!

From React/TS, to Kotlin, to PG, to the JOOQ shout out.

I hoped a strongly(ish) language that spans from BE to FE, like ReasonML, would be ready by now, but it isn't.

Kotlin to JS is not there I'm afraid:

https://kotlinlang.org/docs/tutorials/javascript/kotlin-to-j...

Going back to old projects using various ORM products makes me cringe nowadays, JOOQ + Postgres are such a powerful combo!

Having a simple language living inside a 30-year old runtime and being able to reach for pretty advanced tools if you need them, is heaven. Not everything is ideal though; there are still holes to be filled in the ecosystem.

If you do something more serious and need compiler help as much as possible, I'd say go for OCaml. Its multi-core parallelism story is still not good but there are ways around that. I hear from some people Idris is good as well.

Of course, true parallelism only comes with multicore CPUs anyways, and this is what the Erlang VM ("BEAM") is geared to. The processes are not threads in the C++ sense and there is no shared memory, but there are separate BEAMs for each CPU core and the processes are scheduled to them. Message passing in the Actor style takes the place of shared memory.

See: https://www.culttt.com/2016/07/27/understanding-concurrency-...

http://jlouisramblings.blogspot.com/2011/07/erlangs-parallel...

Also:

> Erlang achieves concurrency by interleaving the execution of processes on the Erlang virtual machine, the BEAM. On a multi-core processor the BEAM can also achieve parallelism by running one scheduler per core and executing one Erlang process per scheduler. The designer of an Erlang system can achieve further parallelism by distributing the system on several computers. > https://happi.github.io/theBeamBook/

My understanding is that the BEAM will also do "work stealing" among schedulers to take better advantage of the available CPUs.

For “dynamic” websites, Mithril (https://mithril.js.org/) and Redux written in Haxe (https://haxe.org/) on the front end with Rocket (https://rocket.rs/) and SQLite on the backend, proxied behind nginx with Let’s Encrypt on the backend.

Personal projects hosted on a VM at Linode, company projects hosted on VMs at Google Cloud.

It’s a somewhat unique stack but I love it and can be exceedingly productive with it.

  Clojure
  Datomic
  Luminus

  ClojureScript
  Regent
  Datascript
  Datsync

  Immutability down to the database
  Database reads scale horizontally
  Impossible SQL injection from reading API
  Cache TTLs can be set to infinity
  Can ask for data at any point in time or do speculative writes
  Same programming language front and back
  Running queries within loops are performant due to data locality 
  Query results can be returned with nested results
  The database can be queried with Clojure functions
  Data shape is defined at query time, not at schema time
  Specs can enforce stronger safety than types
  Specs can help generatively test your application
  Prolog -> Datalog many things from SQL can be expressed easier in datalog i.e. recursion, nesting, joins etc

The equivalent would be a site were you could write SQL client side, to define your data for your application then add react code to complete your app

Backend: Go (no framework, just the standard library)

Frontend: Vue

Working great so far. A little longer to get things up than using Rails/Django, but the extra speed and control is really nice.

Using Go's templating engine to assemble Vue components into HTML <script> tags works well.

I haven't yet seen any concrete tutorials for getting this up and running with Vue and Go. All I've been able to google is augustoroman/V8 and dop251/jago and other derivatives.

My only dependency is Vue (and vuex), and I only send the components that the current page needs (packed into a single <script> by the template engine). I also send the initial data inlined in that script as js objects. So there's 1 fetch to get the the HTML (usually around 200-300Kb), then 4 fetches (vuejs, vuex, css, logo file) totalling around 500Kb (and all cached, so that only happens on the first load).

So far, no speed problem and no rendering lag worth worrying about. If that changes I'll look at methods of fixing it, but I'm learning to not solve problems that I don't have yet.

Html and css always via Pug and Sass.

Out back, I really, really like minimalism, usually in the form of a single executable made with Nim. Static link whenever possible, so I can just bang the thing unto anything linuxish. For a reasonably low-volume site (meaning 99.9% of all sites), I go with SQLite for data. Yes, there'll be shouts of outrage that I shouldn't do it. These I know I can safely ignore, but keep my code clean and simple and easily portable to Postgresql if the should occasionally arise.

Sometimes I need easy access to every library function ever written, so I'll drop the purity and go Python. Bottle or Cherrypy is what like to build on, then.

No matter what, these days run the whole thing behind a Caddy server and be done with any headaches over configs and https.

I realise, of course, that I am completely out of whack with current general consensus. So be it. My stuff works, and works fast, and I can cram amazing amount of it into a fairly low-end VPS.

It works marvellously well. I use VueJS when I have a page which requires more intensive JS.

For dead simple use case (no subdomains), I was even able to embed caddy within my static binary file.

Serving hundreds of users on a $5 VPS.

And yes of course, Go. Solid language, good tools, and a much richer set of libraries than Nim. First rate solution, and I have tried. Several times. But for some reason, Go and I always end up in a shouting match, and one of us inevitably slams a door. It's a purely personal thing.