HONC | hɒŋk |

abbreviation informal

HONC is an modular collection of choice technologies for building lightweight, type-safe, edge-enabled data apis that scale seamlessly to their demand.

It's 2024, I'm building a data API and I'm using TypeScript. What do I use?

- Every developer out there

TL;DR

npm create honc-app@latest

Most of the talk about the "best stack" in the TypeScript world is about "server components", "partial hydrations" and maybe SPAs. What if you need a simple backend to run a background job, or power your third-party integrations (✨AI✨)? In other words: something to receive some JSON, store it, process it, and return it. To create a data API you will need:

  • 🪿 A database (duh)
  • 🪿 An ORM layer
  • 🪿 A router/middleware framework to help you wire it all together
  • 🪿 Someone else's computer to deploy it all on

┏┓
┃┃╱╲ In this
┃╱╱╲╲ house
╱╱╭╮╲╲ we love
▔▏┗┛▕▔ & appreciate
╱▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔╲
|   JSON   |
╱╱┏┳┓╭╮┏┳┓╲╲
▔▏┗┻┛┃┃┗┻┛▕▔

Overview

  • hono illustration icon

    Hono

    Hono. So hot right now. Hono is a Typescript framework for apis (and more!) that looks a lot like Express, except it’s smaller (14kB smoll), lighter, faster, and runs anywhere that supports Web Standards. We’re talking Cloudflare, Deno, Bun, Vercel, Netlify, Node, and more. It has a bunch of helpful middleware to get you going, and a friendly and helpful community.

  • orm illustration icon

    ORM (Drizzle)

    You either use an ORM or you live long enough to build one yourself. Typescript apis need some sort of contract between the data and the application code. Do you need a traditional ORM for this? No, you do not. But we really wanted to put an O in HONC. And Drizzle ORM (our tool of choice) has a typesafe query builder for tons of relational databases.

  • db illustration icon

    Neon

    Postgres is bopping these days. Need vector storage for your AI apps? Check. Need to stash some JSON blobs? Done. And for everything else, there’s an extension. Neon is a serverless Postgres database that grows right along with your app, no AWS certification needed. We also like Supabase, which throws in real-time updates, authentication and an edge runtime for good measure. Just use Postgres.

  • cloud illustration icon

    Cloud (Cloudflare)

    We need a place to run our app, and unless you're nostalgic for the soothing hum of a box in your basement, the cloud is where it's at. Cloudflare Workers loves Hono as much as we do.

Examples

Retrieval Augmented Goose

Build your own AI search engine. With great goose intelligence comes great responsibility.

Strava calories converter

Using webhooks, convert Strava activities to calories. Watch those calogeese fly off!

Agitated goose PR reviewer

Have a goose judging your GitHub pull requests. Warning: you might get bamgoosled!

Quickstart

npm create honc-app@latest
# or yarn or pnpm...