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Recommendations for WebApp

#1

Hello!

I am looking to develop a webapp with Webflow, using Webflow + Hosting as the frontend, with communication through javascript to a backend, or through Webtasks/Lambda, etc. Would this be recommended in production, or should this only be prototyping?

It would really be nice to have something like this work for development of this app and future apps.

Regards,
Travis

#2

Just to clarify, I would like to have the Webapp hosted through Webflow, and it handling login, routing, etc. But, use javascript to communicate to the backend. I know this being possible, my question for the community is, is it recommended?

Using Webflow would speed up the design of the frontend exponentially, especially considering be able to host it directly with webflow.

Regards,
Travis

#3

I don’t think I would use Webflow for a project like this. Even for normal websites I often run into problems when using custom code, because of the following problems:

  • use of webpack and other frontend tools gets more difficult, since you can not access the html and css
  • changing name values of form inputs overwrites the id of the same input
  • ids are hidden in the settings, it can easily happen that you delete an element which was actually important since you select it by id
  • the use of combo-classes makes it hard to add classes that you only need for JS. Example: You have a Link with the class “button”, and you also add the class “special-trigger” that you will need for JS but that doesn’t add any styling. If you now want to add another class for styling, you have to remember to remove “special-trigger”, add the new class, and add “special-trigger” again afterwards. Even worse, you forget to remove it and the styling is dependent on the js class! Have fun reversing all stylings that you just did :slight_smile:

Maybe a solution would be to build the layout with web flow, then export all code and continue working with a traditional text editor?

#4

Thank you Andre!

The insight you provided was excellent, and it made a lot of sense. It would be interesting if Webflow would offer the ability for something like this in the future!

Regards,
Travis