I want to create a web app that we will use internally; it would allow people in a meeting to go to a web page, enter their name, and then have a button for “hand up” or “hand down” and an indicator of whether their hand is up or down presently; the chair of the meeting would have an admin view that simply shows a list in order of who raised their hand first, and the ability to lower someone’s hand.<p>(Yes just like in MS Teams or in Zoom)<p>Any suggestions for the simplest/least-friction language/framework to get started?<p>This is partly a toy problem to get me into web app coding but partly something we might actually use.<p>I’ve never coded a web app before but I know C/MATLAB/Python/R in the scientific computing context and I used to know Objective-C in the old Mac system.<p>Emphasis on simple, non-bloated, approaches. I come from the tradition of coding in C with little or no dependencies.<p>Non-snarky suggestions welcome! Thanks!
Try Apps Script in Google Sheets. No need to learn HTML or CSS. Can do cron jobs and triggers for automatic type actions.<p>And apps script is pretty much just Javascript.<p>And users are familiar with Google Sheets already.
C# with blazor makes it really easy. You don't need to leave Visual Studio or deal with weird backend/frontend issues. It's all one application, and things are done on the frontend through C#, so it's all a single language. It's genuinely the best way to develop GUI/layout.<p>Otherwise, Flask with python and Typescript(It's a superset of javascript, that has types and a few other things, it's the future, and alot easier to program and get compiler hints).
For deployment, I like Cloudflare Pages/Workers for small projects and <a href="https://fly.io">https://fly.io</a> for large projects.<p>For frontend, I think you'll really enjoy Elm if you like R and Python. Personally, I use vanilla JS (no framework) for small projects and Elm for large projects.<p>For backend, there are plenty of excellent REST API frameworks for Rust, Go, Deno, Elixir, etc. I can give specific language recommendations if you're interested.<p>[1] <a href="https://elm-lang.org" rel="nofollow">https://elm-lang.org</a><p>[2] <a href="http://vanilla-js.com" rel="nofollow">http://vanilla-js.com</a>
I don't think you need a framework. Javascript since you're building for the web.<p>I'd probably go with a static site with a realtime backend (Supabase/Firebase or Hasura).
Having no prior experience with npm/node build system will make learning any framework hard.<p>Sveltekit is the easiest framework to learn so I'd suggest you start from there.
If you already know how to code in python, a framework like django may be a good foundation for a simple web app that can grow to something more complex.