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Alternatives

Products that do what Undead – scary fast, bewitching web pages on the JVM with no JavaScript does

Hey HN. I wrote a LiveView implementation for the JVM called Undead. (The name Undead is a play on the "Live" part of LiveViews.) I had been waiting for the new StringTemplates feature of Java 21 which made it scary-easy to get the right data structures to make things work. It's been enchanting to write Java after about ten years in Javascript and Go lands. Would love folks to try it out and lmk what you think. If you aren't too scared that is. ;)

  1. 1IF
  2. 2VT

    Hey HN! We're so excited to show you Val Town (https://val.town)! A "val" is a JavaScript/TypeScript function or value that runs on our servers. We aim to get you from idea to running code in seconds: type code, run it, get its API endpoint, schedule it - all from the browser, in a couple keystrokes. We're a startup of 4 people, mostly in NYC. We've been working on this for 6 months and are eager for feedback from the HN community. Why do we need yet another online coding IDE? While researching devtools[1], I found myself wanting something halfway between Replit and Zapier: a…

    2023 · val.town

  3. 3JA

    I've open sourced a JavaScript to WASM compiler. It's an experimental tool, but given the semantics I already implemented, I'm fairly certain I am able to eventually cover 100% of JavaScript spec. Any ideas, questions or critique welcomed! If you are interested in WASM, especially with new proposals like WASM GC or exception handling, it might be a good source of seeing these features in action - the project has a few thousand lines of hand written WAT so far.

    2024 · github.com

  4. 4VA

    We’ve been working on Vaev, a minimal web browser engine built from scratch. It supports HTML/XHTML, the CSS cascade, @page rules for pagination, and print-to-PDF rendering. It even handles calc(), var(), and percentage units—and yes, it renders Google.com (mostly). This is an experimental project focused on learning and exploration. Networking is basic (http:// and file:// only), and grid layouts aren’t supported yet, but we’re making progress fast. We’d love your thoughts and feedback.

    2025 · github.com

  5. 5AJ

    Here's a project I've been working on for a little while now. Ripl is a JS library that provides a unified API for rendering shapes on both canvas and SVG interchangeably. Over the years I've used D3 extensively to create data visualisations so I figured I'd have a go at making my own version with a slightly more modern API and stricter TypeScript support. I am aware there are already libraries that can draw to multiple contexts interchangeably, but I've added a few little niceties to Ripl that (as far as I know) some other libraries don't have such as CSS-like query selectors, DOM-like…

    2024 · github.com

  6. 6RJ
  7. 7VT

    Hi All, this is Shardul here - I am the co-founder of Videobug. https://bug.video We are super excited to share Videobug with you. Videobug records run time code execution so that developers can watch it line by line as frequently as they want, right in their IDE. It takes away the pain of recreating exact conditions that led to a bug and saves developer time in every bug squash. Parth (my co-founder) and I have worked on multiple production grade applications in startups and enterprises. We used Logrocket, Sentry, and Datadog for logging and found ourselves adding more logs after…

    2022

  8. 8LT

    Author here. I really love the programming paradigm behind by Phoenix LiveView applications and wanted to expand the ecosystem to include programmers like myself that love Typescript. In summary, LiveViewJS reuses all the Phoenix client code and implemented a new backend in Typescript to handle client events and send back updates. Lots more detail and examples in the repo. Would love any questions and/or feedback. Thanks!

    2022 · github.com

  9. 9

    Scientific computation for JavaScript

    2016

  10. 10L

    LiveCoder is a fun tool I built almost a year ago to simulate live coding Frontend technologies for my presentations. You actually don't have to live-code, but just prepare beforehand the program, snippets of HTML, CSS and Javascript and you feed the tool with it, so you can just focus on explaining what's being coded. Simple :-) I never really shared this tool, but I used it in a few presentations quite succesfully, so I think it could be an interesting tool to use. You have full control of the speed. You can pause and resume... An entire app can be live-coded with this. It's quite fun to…

    2017

  11. 11UO

    Hello HN! Parth, and Shardul here. We have been building unlogged.io for the last 21 months. We started as a time travel debugger and pivoted to record and replay with assertions, mocking, and code coverage. You can save the replays in the form of a JSON and commit them to your git. Both Parth and I come from an e-commerce/payments background where production bugs meant heavy financial losses. Big billion days/Black Friday sales meant months of code freezes with low productivity. Before committing the code, we wanted to replay production traffic and know the breaking changes right…

    2023

  12. 12RY

    I recently needed to make a text appear on a website and I wanted to get this real human feeling that computers don't have. I only found the TypeIt lib but it was not free and I didn't want to add a dependency for such a simple case. Human replay allows to copy paste a few lines of JS to make a text appear exactly how you typed it.

    2024 · einenlum.github.io

  13. 13TN

    I am excited to introduce to you TargetJ, a new JavaScript framework that can animate anything. I have been working on this project for over two years, driven by the complexity of current UI frameworks. You can find the interactive documentation at www.targetj.io. I hope you find it useful for creating great web experiences. If you have any questions about the framework or want to share your thoughts, please leave a comment below. I’m eager to hear from you!

    2024 · github.com

  14. 14JA

    Hi HN! I’d like to share with you my project: JSDB. Two months ago I had this thought while reviewing a PR on a web application. What if I didn’t have to write code to communicate with my backend or database? It would be fun to just use arrays and objects like you normally do in javascript and have things magically save. That weekend I hacked together something that used proxies and classes to ‘magically’ send data to your backend when you assign or access properties in an object or array. Using the same API you already know. This means you can save data like this: items[x] = {a:2,b:false}…

    2022 · javascriptdb.com

  15. 15IM

    Primarily built this to learn how NextJS works and also a bit about Tailwind CSS. Also has request caching using the WebCache API + expiration which is quite a hacky implementation. Let me know what you think! Source is at https://github.com/say4n/hn, pull requests welcome!

    2023 · hn.sayan.page

  16. 16AS

    This is a browser front-end (ultra simple) for Chrome, built using puppeteer. I like it because it provides a usable single browser tab (that conveniently crashes on certificate errors (thanks to puppeteers default flags which I haven't altered here)), without using any JS scripting on the client side. There's some clever hacks to get that to work, including stylesheet media queries (to zero in on the correct viewport dimensions), and MJPEG, a crazy HTTP keep-alive way to stream JPEG frames of a video, favored by old-style CCTV/security/web cameras allegedly. I noticed it went from…

    2022

  17. 17LP

    live-paint (https://paint.liveviews.cc/) is a demonstration of ts-liveview v2-rc3. The server converts JSX expression into plain HTML response. The UI is then updated via websocket. As opposite to React.js. The DOM updates are fired from server, and instructed with query selector (no virtual DOM). Hence, the amount of javascript downloaded and executed by client are minimal (or even optional for static web pages).

    2021

  18. 18TP

    Hi HN! We launched Codebuff last week, and it gave us a fun idea to try: Twitch plays Codebuff. We rigged up Twitch chat to control an old laptop of ours by sending Codebuff commands. Any chat message prefixed with ‘>’ is interpreted as a command for Codebuff. We’re starting with a blank web app running on localhost. So if you say “> Make the header spin”, then Codebuff will modify the css to make it happen. Codebuff can also run any terminal command (I hope you don’t brick our laptop haha). Yesterday we tested this out with our community and they successfully got Codebuff to add a map of…

    2024 · twitch.tv

  19. 19EO

    Hi HN, We're a small team working on a new dataviz engine and its applications. We built our charting engine in C++ and run it on WebAssembly. Two years ago, we launched Vizzu as an open-source animated data visualization library aimed at JS developers, allowing users to create dynamic charts. We also released a Python wrapper under the name ipyvizzu for data scientists. Since then, we've been working hard to make this technology accessible to everyone, regardless of their coding skills. Today, we're proud to introduce our no-code storytelling tool. With this tool, anyone can turn their…

    2024 · vizzu.io

  20. 20SL

    StackHive is a browser based website development tool that helps developers and designers in saving a majority of their development time. Packed with a live code editor, importing existing websites and a visual editor; StackHive brings the best of both worlds (Visual Editing and Full Code Control) to responsive website development and converts the browser into a fully functional and extremely capable IDE for static web development. We just released it a few days back and would love to get some feedback from the developers out there who struggle with front-end development! You can check it…

    2014

  21. 21

    Don't read JavaScript watch it run, visually

    Jan 2026

  22. 22FJ
  23. 23RD

    Hi everyone, I've been working on this thing for a while. It transpiles Haml into Ruby, and then it streams patches to the browser which update the DOM. There is a memory leak in s.rb, which I'm not really sure how to solve. Seems like objects stay alive for longer than they should because of circular references or something but I'm not sure what's going on to be honest. I think this approach has potential though.

    2023 · github.com

  24. 24IM

    Hey Hacker News, I'm the maker of Kopage, a free & self-hosted Website Builder. While working on new, cool features (AI, of course), it would be great to hear some HN feedback :) Thanks, Simon

    2024 · kopage.com

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