What if I told you, that you did not need React, NextJS, Vue, Angular or any of the majorly popular frontend frameworks to build a dynamic web application?

I am going to assume, that unless you have been living under a rock, most of you would have heard of HTMX by now. If you have not heard of it, do you even dev bro?

Anyway, to get to the point, and the meat of this post, I want to stretch the limits of what is possible when building a web application without one of the big JavaScript names or web frameworks.

I did however recognise, there would be various steps I would need to complete for every project I was about to embark on the journey of building.

So I came up with 'Napp' - Which is an abbreviation of Nano App, a term I am using to describe a web application that has a very small footprint and I decided that like any good developer, I would procrastinate building an actual project and first build a project generator.

Napp bootstraps a new application for you by creating a project, necessary files and connects them all up so you can dive straight into building your application.

It has no opinion on how you structure your project, whether you want 50 directories or just 3. It enables you to get a new project, utilising Go, HTMX and SQLite put together in around 60 seconds or so, which is Blazingly Fast - So Prime!

The idea is, for me at least, I want to be able to focus on building whatever it is I have convinced myself is going to make me wealthy af vs having to decide if my directories should have an index.ts to re-export my exports or not.

So, I have just generated 2 projects, ready to develop a a little further and I have them both deployed and using a persisted SQLite database so that I can prototype my idea, and start collecting user feedback.

If you are interested in learning more here are some links:

• Napp CLI Tool

• Generated Napp

I am unsure on if there is anything more I am going to add to the generator at this point. Maybe I will put user auth back in there and have a user flow ready to go. I will however being doing a deployment post pretty soon to show how I got them deployed nice and quickly using Fly.io