I have noticed newer generations of developers believe they need heavy frameworks like React to develop web applications. Most apps don't need such heavy frameworks. Here's a 500-line "framework" (if you can call it that) https://github.com/Rajeev-K/mvc-router and here's an example app built using it: https://github.com/Rajeev-K/eureka For templates I used https://github.com/wisercoder/uibuilder which is a 200-line lib. This is about as "close to the metal" as you can get, and still be productive.