Hono, "Ultrafast" Web Framework for the Edge

What is Hono

Hono - [炎] means flame🔥 in Japanese - is a small, simple, and ultrafast web framework for Cloudflare Workers, Deno, Bun, and others.

Hono Features

Hono gives developers 5 features that would help make web development simple and effective while ensuring high-performance standards:

• Hono is ultrafast thanks to its smart routing technique which automatically chooses the best routing algorithm upon request.
• Hono has zero dependencies as it uses the Web Standard API for networking and HTTP protocol communications.
• Hono has built-in middleware for repetitive tasks such as authentication, CORS, cache, compression, GraphQL server, and many more.
• Hono has first-class TypeScript support for an improved developer experience.
• Hono is executable on multiple JavaScript platforms with the same codebase.

Development in Hono

 bun add hono

import { Hono } from 'hono'

const app = new Hono();

app.get('/', (c) => c.text('Hello from Hono!'))

and run:

bun ./index.ts

To run Hono on Node.js:

npm i --save hono @honojs/node-server typescript
# or
yarn add hono @honojs/node-server typescript

import { serve } from '@honojs/node-server'
import { Hono } from 'hono'

const app = new Hono();

app.get('/', (c) => c.text('Hello from Hono!'))

serve(app)

npx tsc .
node ./index.js

## install ts-node
npm i ts-node --save-dev
# or
yarn add -D ts-node

## run the server
ts-node ./index.ts

Hono Benchmarks

On Cloudflare Workers

On Deno

On Bun

Conclusion

Whether Hono will be the de-facto framework for edge web server is debatable. However, given its performance and ease of use, it is possible that Hono will stand firm and have a good share of deployments in edge environments, especially for Cloudflare Workers.