HyperDev and Serverless Prototyping
I was a little behind the curve, but I just heard about HyperDev last week. I’ve had a chance to use it a little and it’s a breath of fresh air. If you aren’t aware of the way that web development has been going for the past few years, we are in a precambrian explosion of different tools and frameworks. Each new tool, language, technology adds a new layer of complexity to learn, or evaluate. Beware chasing after the newest thing in programming, though. This process often requires setting up a development environment on your local machine. Setting up dev environments and managing them across applications is a notoriously hard problem. Doing it for the first time is usually frustrating, especially when you’re trying to convince a friend or coworker to try something out.
HyperDev fits into the equation by making it so that you don’t have to download anything, install npm, run any commands from the terminal or even stand up a virtual machine. You can just open the webpage, see all the pertinent code that powers a simple web application, and just make changes. Those changes are applied instantly and your application is available for testing in another tab right away.
If you need to teach someone the basics of node.js, this is the best way I can imagine doing it. If you want to learn a new front end framework (like I recently did with Vue.js) you can pull open a basic web application with a demo API, and just focus on writing front end javascript and html and css with a zero friction environment, including live-reload. If you know about jsfiddle or CodePen, this is just like that but on steroids.
I’ve tried out Source Lair before and it offers a very similar set of functionality. The only difference is that HyperDev is reaching an educational audience instead of a purely professional audience. And it abandons a lot of the power Source Lair has to make things simple and fast (and free!).
So my idea for future web development projects is to rapidly protoype visual design and UX in a collaborative styleguide based on patternlab and then build out functional prototypes of front end features using hyperdev. Then that front-end code can be pulled into a private repository, the back-end code can be re-deployed on a different hosting environment like Azure Functions, Azure Websites, Amazon AWS Lambda, Heroku etc for future nodejs development. This would leave a place for rapid iterations with the design team, a seperate iteration and collaboration space for front end developers while the back end developers can take the lessons from that prototype and build out a more robust and maintainable applicaiton architecture.