Which front-end tool would you use to build an e-commerce web app today?

The least painful approach is (and always has been) to write the entire (e-commerce) (web) app in Smalltalk, specifically Squeak (or several forks like Cuis, Pharo). I once wrote an entire webshop with Stripe payments in a single afternoon that had the sophistication of the Apple Store.

There is not one framework but several, some are mainly Smalltalk, some are more javascript wrappers or ported to javascript. I have omitted a lot of other 'Smalltalks in the browsers'. Another language would be LISP, like [9] in which HN itself is build. I'd love to demo some of these sophisticated front- and back-end frameworks, mail morphle at ziggo dot nl.

[1] https://www.seaside.st

[2] https://www.piercms.com/

[3] https://squeak.js.org

[4] https://caffeine.js.org

[5] https://lively-kernel.org

[6] https://croquet.io

[7] https://smalltalkzoo.thechm.org

[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dabble_DB (aquihired by Twitter)

[9] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23191147

Vue.js 3 + Vert.x backend (plus Nuxt if I needed SSR). If less interactivity were required, Rails (or rather Grails) and Alpine.js. But it's not that these technologies are inherently better than something else, I'd simply go with what I know & have had positive experience with. If you don't have any web experience, try to find a stack at least related to something you do know.

Marko[1] immediately comes to mind. It’s developed by, and powers most of, eBay. High performance, “isomorphic” (same code runs server-/client-side), small client bundle with automatic “partial hydration” (compiler uses static analysis to only send JS for interactive parts of the view).

Another good option might be Astro[2] which has a lot of similar goals to Marko, but lets you “bring your own framework” for the interactive parts, so you can achieve a similar experience to Marko with more mainstream tools/syntax.

1: https://markojs.com/

2: https://astro.build/

Wordpress. Worked in company using Woocommerce for their e-commerce solution, It was profitable at that. That is if you want a quick and simple solution. If you want something less turnkey and more flexible but more tasking, Django or Laravel is a good option.

Don't overcomplicate things, simplicity is often underrated on the web side of development. This is coming from a guy who writes low level embedded c and c++ on a daily basis.

I wouldn’t recommend it but I start my frontend projects in the defunct enyojs boilerplate. It’s gone now but Enyo had Onyx. A fully featured component library. I’ve never seen a component library as tightly coupled to a JavaScript framework. Sadly, as mentioned, enyojs is no more. Saying that reactjs, the successor to enyo is an adequate replacement. Some of the team made a react fork called Enact Enyo+React that brings back some of the great onyx components. But I haven’t used it as there are many other component libraries available in the react ecosystem to choose from.

It’s also tempting to go jamstack to start a new frontend project. Some of these boilerplates are very bleeding edge however and you will be spending a lot of time learning the convention of each individual boilerplate. I’d be hesitant to start a new jamstack project.

Depends on the app.

MobX + React + Websockets looks good for some things. (Controller apps for my home IoT system)

For other things where agility really matters (say a system for building machine learning training sets where you might want to add new tasks) I'd ditch the SPA because I wouldn't want to have to modify the front end just to add a new task.

I'm also dreaming about making systems that are WebGL based and not quite sure how I'll do it.

I'd be tempted to use DocUI which uses Flutter for the UI, and represents the UI with JSON which can be built from any language-supported SDK. It lacks real-time data refresh for the moment though. An Open Source release should be available in a month or two. https://nexusdev.tools

That said, React seems to be hugely popular these days.

Shopify.

Hybrid SPA Laravel Livewire with Tailwind CSS

yew.rs