Recently, I realized the workflow I had built for my personal blog, was causing me to not want to write. Originally, I had built this site as a way to dive into learning about SvelteKit and it's application model. While I still love SvelteKit, I started to feel that it's just too much infrastructure for a simple Markdown blog. This led me to start looking at different solutions that would allow me to do two things; simplify the system, and learn something new.
Enter Hono
I've heard many people praise Hono.js, an edge ready server framework, over the last few months in various places, so I decided to check it out. Hono has an Express like API, however what sold me on the framework was all of it's differences from Express.
- TypeScript support built-in
- Deploy anywhere - edge runtimes, Node, Bun, Deno, and more
- Built on Web Standards
- HTML helpers enable JSX syntax for UI composition
- Tons of built-in middleware
All of these features bundled together feels incredibly modern, while also feeling incredibly natural if you've ever worked with an Express like framework. I won't be diving into any code in this article, but I encourage you to checkout the source code for this version of my blog, and also the Hono docs, if you're interested in learning more.
Thoughts after using Hono
I honestly have nothing bad to say about Hono; as I started from scratch moving each route of my site, I ran into no issues at all. From dev, to deploying the worker to Cloudflare, the docs were extremely straighforward and all of the tools just worked. If you're looking to build a serverless api, server render some HTML, or build any micro-service in TypeScript, I'd implore you to consider Hono. I believe it will bring you a lot of joy to write code that feels so familiar, with all of the modern tools we've come to rely on in the JavaScript space.