Hono & Lightweight Highlights Summary

Every highlight bullet from the 6 pages in this section, gathered on one page and grouped by the page it came from.

Lightweight Web Frameworks

• Lightweight frameworks are built on Web Standard Request/Response, not Node's http.IncomingMessage
• Middleware composes as nested layers around a handler, not a flat pipeline
• Portability across Node, Workers, Deno, and Bun comes from avoiding Node-only globals, not from smaller file size alone
• Small footprint mainly matters for cold starts - it rarely changes steady-state throughput

Hono Basics

• Hono is a lightweight, standards-based web framework (~14KB)
• Same API runs on Node, Cloudflare Workers, Deno, and Bun
• Context (c) carries request, response helpers, and variables
• Built-in middleware: logger, cors, compress, jwt
• Route groups with app.route() for modular APIs
• Use @hono/node-server for Node 24 deployment

Hono on Node vs Edge

• Build shared routes with createApp() factory; Node and Workers run identical code
• Avoid node:fs and node:net in shared code; abstract I/O behind fetch adapters
• Use Neon serverless or Supabase HTTP instead of native TCP-based database drivers
• Workers CPU time limit is 30s; handlers that exceed it must offload work
• Pass config into createApp() instead of process.env for cross-runtime portability
• Test with wrangler dev before production; edge runtimes behave differently than Node

Koa & Polka

• Koa uses ctx instead of (req, res) with awaited middleware
• Polka is a minimal router requiring manual body parsing and middleware
• Koa ecosystem is shrinking; start new projects on Hono or Fastify
• Wrap Koa handlers in try/catch to prevent losing async errors
• Neither framework includes validation; add Zod or Ajv middleware
• Hono offers modern alternative with edge support and small size

Framework Selection Checklist

• Hono unifies Workers and Node code for edge deployments
• Use NestJS only if your team needs DI and modular structure
• Fastify beats Express on throughput and JSON Schema validation
• Endpoint count and team familiarity determine practical choices
• Always profile your bottleneck before switching for performance
• Skip NestJS for small APIs under 10 endpoints

Lightweight Frameworks Best Practices

• Use Hono for new lightweight projects; avoid starting new Koa apps
• Shared createApp() factory for Node and edge portability
• Zod validation at boundaries with @hono/zod-validator
• Route groups with app.route() before files grow past 200 lines
• Runtime-specific adapters; shared route logic
• Document framework choice in ADR with revisit date