Hono Js - Another Express clone?

Sourabh Singh — Fri, 06 Dec 2024 19:58:03 +0000

Hono.Js, the new talk of the town, either you are hating it or loving it but you aren’t ignoring it.

I’ve recently tried Hono.Js and yes just like you I was very much skeptical in the beginning and was researching on various performance bench marks for Hono in comparison to other frameworks. So let me share my experience on the new framework, how I felt and is it worth you try.

The Goods 👍

Hono.js stands out as a lightweight, fast, and flexible framework which is designed for modern applications. It’s built-in support for tools like RPC, AWS, Edge platforms (Cloudflare, Vercel), and JSX makes it a great choice for developers who are looking for simplicity and don’t want to compromise with the functionalities.

Hono has built in support for complex tools like RPC, AWS, Edge functionality, Cloudflare, JSX and many more. Obviously you can go and check out their official website at hono.dev and get better understanding of various features they offer as there are a lot!

Vast Runtime Support - Hono is not rigid and provides support for various runtimes so that you don’t have to compromise on your favorite one. Currently it support runtimes like Cloudflare, Fastly, Deno, Node Js, Bun, and AWS.
Great DX - Hono has a great amount of built in libraries and middleware which makes it easier to build a quick prototype or increase your development speed as you won’t need to install and setup every other which makes it a great choice for startups.
Fast and Lightweight - Hono uses RegExpRouter which makes it really fast (even I don’t know what reg exp router so here is what ChatGPT told me 😅 ). RegExpRouter uses regular expressions for routing, making it faster and more lightweight compared to traditional approaches.
Edge Support - Hono has a great support for the popular Edge platforms like Vercel, Cloudflare and AWS which makes it easier to work and deploy on the edge.

Performance Benchmarks ⚡

I am just broke as you so I don’t have any funds to rent the expensive AWS instances and run benchmarks. But I can share you the resources I used to get an idea of actual performance potential of Hono’s performance.

Medium Blogs - You can consider the blogs from Mayank C on Medium
YouTube Videos - Well there aren’t much organic videos on YouTube for this purpose so you need to stick to the blogs. 😔

Getting Started with Hono

It is hell easy to get started with hono. You just need to write the following command in your terminal and everything will be setup for you.

bunx create-hono@latest

This script will ask you all the dependencies you want to add to your project.

And then you will be greeted with your Hello world function based on the options you chose at the time of initialization.

Is Hono Just another Express Clone? 🤔

While Hono.js shares some similarities with Express in terms of syntax, it is far more than a clone. Hono is designed with performance and modern use cases in mind, such as seamless integration with edge platforms and support for runtimes like Bun, Deno, and Fastly. These features place it in a category of its own, making it a worthy contender in the framework ecosystem.

Final Thoughts

Hono.Js is a great backend framework which completely deserves a try. I bet you will love it. It tries to provide us many benefits out of the box eliminating the hassle of setting up various dependencies and work. It is great for edge use cases and for building startups and getting better day by day.