The focus of this article is all over the board. You could write the same article about not needing a backend framework, or not needing any framework. Or I would argue nobody should be making a one user forum. If you are doing it just for fun, or to practice skills, then what you want to learn is the primary driver of your choice in framework, front end or backend, and renders the rest of your points moot.
I kind of regret the title, as this was more to share something I learned or discovered making my app--rather than to tell people what they should/shouldn't do. It was more about my thoughts/experience. That's why you got the impression that the focus is all over the place.
I think it wasn't that you discovered you may not need a framework. You discovered that you didn't need a client rendering framework. Express is actually considered a framework. It's meant to help you create web apps. And it's only a recent development in the industry that we started to send only JSON from the server and have the client parse it and render something new on the page.
I'm glad you discovered Express HTML templating. :) It's quite simpler than doing SPAs, as you've noticed. It's my go to for quick prototypes. I only do SPAs if I'm sure I'll need some rich client functionality. And even then, sometimes I can get by with just adding some JS to the rendered page that allows the user to have that page change with some AJAX calls before they move on to a different page. And for that, I can use jQuery, or just vanilla JS if I don't think I need jQuery.
If this project becomes anything more than an experiment, I can easily my Express endpoints ones that return JSON and then build a front end. I think that's my biggest take away. My oohhh I gotta share this moment.
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The focus of this article is all over the board. You could write the same article about not needing a backend framework, or not needing any framework. Or I would argue nobody should be making a one user forum. If you are doing it just for fun, or to practice skills, then what you want to learn is the primary driver of your choice in framework, front end or backend, and renders the rest of your points moot.
I kind of regret the title, as this was more to share something I learned or discovered making my app--rather than to tell people what they should/shouldn't do. It was more about my thoughts/experience. That's why you got the impression that the focus is all over the place.
I think it wasn't that you discovered you may not need a framework. You discovered that you didn't need a client rendering framework. Express is actually considered a framework. It's meant to help you create web apps. And it's only a recent development in the industry that we started to send only JSON from the server and have the client parse it and render something new on the page.
I'm glad you discovered Express HTML templating. :) It's quite simpler than doing SPAs, as you've noticed. It's my go to for quick prototypes. I only do SPAs if I'm sure I'll need some rich client functionality. And even then, sometimes I can get by with just adding some JS to the rendered page that allows the user to have that page change with some AJAX calls before they move on to a different page. And for that, I can use jQuery, or just vanilla JS if I don't think I need jQuery.
If this project becomes anything more than an experiment, I can easily my Express endpoints ones that return JSON and then build a front end. I think that's my biggest take away. My oohhh I gotta share this moment.