How would you build a simple, dynamic website in 2024?

Question

I&rsquo;m looking at a new project that will basically contain a search bar and a bunch of content boxes that are dynamically populated with data from a backend based on the search.Most of my limited frontend experience has been React, and I&rsquo;ve always been displeased with the extreme amount of crisscrossing dependencies and not really knowing what&rsquo;s going on behind the mountain of npm modules.I suspect many would suggest raw JS/HTMl/CSS, but I do enjoy having (limited) &ldquo;handrails&rdquo; that are often included with frameworks, plus I imagine raw JS/HTML would become too messy to quickly.I&rsquo;m looking for something that will let me build a simple site with dynamic feature that doesn&rsquo;t have a huge backlog of dependencies and mysterious magic behind the scenes. Does that exist in 2024?

nness · Accepted Answer

I've never used it, but sounds like you could pair a static-site generator and htmx for your particular use-case.
Alternatively if you want to work with JSON, Vue.js stills runs within the browser without any build dependencies — it's what I use for small utilities or site mocks, just a little weighty as it includes the template parsing engine — but not mandatory.
https://jamstack.org/generators/ https://htmx.org/

ksjskskskkk · Answer

php8 is exactly what you described. avoid anything not in core. no modules. no autoloader etc. and then sprinkle a js frontend which just adds functionality on top of raw html.