<story><title>Ask HN: What&apos;s is your go to toolset for simple front end development?</title><text>I&amp;#x27;m quite firmly in back end development. Often times I find myself wanting to have a simple front end to which I can attach some new experiments for home brew coding such as Flask.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;d not mind if my front end looked a little bit nice, but don&amp;#x27;t want to spend forever learning, hand coding, and trouble shooting html, css, JavaScript.&lt;p&gt;What&amp;#x27;s in your toolkit for some simple front end drag and drop style block building that gives you enough of a template to get started? I&amp;#x27;ve seen the odd one posted on HN over the years, but never had the foresight to save one.&lt;p&gt;Given its home lab style stuff I don&amp;#x27;t really want to dive into the likes of Webflow, Canva, etc.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>jonnycat</author><text>If you need any kind of interactivity on the frontend, but are more comfortable with the backend, I would suggest looking at Phoenix LiveView [0] or a similar server-rendered HTML technology for your language of your choice [1].&lt;p&gt;In short, these solutions take JavaScript out of the mix entirely and basically let you deal with a single logical &amp;quot;app&amp;quot;, rather than a separate frontend &amp;amp; backend.&lt;p&gt;[0] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;phoenixframework&amp;#x2F;phoenix_live_view&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;phoenixframework&amp;#x2F;phoenix_live_view&lt;/a&gt;
[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;dbohdan&amp;#x2F;liveviews&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;dbohdan&amp;#x2F;liveviews&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dhucerbin</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve been involved in two projects that use LiveView and both of them have similar path.&lt;p&gt;First, engineers build application using just LiveView and it works just fine. You click a link you have table with your data, you click button you have filtered table, click another link you see a chart.&lt;p&gt;But then UX concerns are raised from PO&amp;#x2F;PM&amp;#x2F;users. Users find it jarring that they need to wait a little to see a loading spinner on clicked button. And we litter our views with some alpine.js DSL in attributes or load stimulus controllers. Some stuff is moved to hooks and kept in ad-hoc global variables.&lt;p&gt;Finally, most of the live views evolve into single html node, with mini-SPA written in some lightweight javascript framework. And everything is wired with phoenix websocket.&lt;p&gt;LiveView is still a fantastic and very productive tool to quickly create applications but I&amp;#x27;m not sure if it scales to users expectations.</text></comment>
<story><title>Ask HN: What&apos;s is your go to toolset for simple front end development?</title><text>I&amp;#x27;m quite firmly in back end development. Often times I find myself wanting to have a simple front end to which I can attach some new experiments for home brew coding such as Flask.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;d not mind if my front end looked a little bit nice, but don&amp;#x27;t want to spend forever learning, hand coding, and trouble shooting html, css, JavaScript.&lt;p&gt;What&amp;#x27;s in your toolkit for some simple front end drag and drop style block building that gives you enough of a template to get started? I&amp;#x27;ve seen the odd one posted on HN over the years, but never had the foresight to save one.&lt;p&gt;Given its home lab style stuff I don&amp;#x27;t really want to dive into the likes of Webflow, Canva, etc.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>jonnycat</author><text>If you need any kind of interactivity on the frontend, but are more comfortable with the backend, I would suggest looking at Phoenix LiveView [0] or a similar server-rendered HTML technology for your language of your choice [1].&lt;p&gt;In short, these solutions take JavaScript out of the mix entirely and basically let you deal with a single logical &amp;quot;app&amp;quot;, rather than a separate frontend &amp;amp; backend.&lt;p&gt;[0] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;phoenixframework&amp;#x2F;phoenix_live_view&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;phoenixframework&amp;#x2F;phoenix_live_view&lt;/a&gt;
[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;dbohdan&amp;#x2F;liveviews&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;dbohdan&amp;#x2F;liveviews&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bluehatbrit</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m in the same camp, I&amp;#x27;ve slowly &amp;quot;regressed&amp;quot; backwards from overcomplicated SPA&amp;#x27;s back to server side rendering. When LiveView hit and I was already using Phoenix it was just perfect. It&amp;#x27;s a slight embelishment on top of multi-page server rendered pages which gives all the benefits I need and nothing more.&lt;p&gt;If I _really_ need something to be driven by the frontend like a transition then I&amp;#x27;ll use Alpine.js.&lt;p&gt;For CSS I tend to use tailwindcss &amp;#x2F; tailwindui because I know it well and it doens&amp;#x27;t need npm. If I didn&amp;#x27;t know tailwind I&amp;#x27;d probably look at something like bootstrap or something I can build on top of with vanilla css.</text></comment>