Best Development Frameworks for GitLab

Nitric is an open source, cloud-agnostic backend framework that enables developers to declare infrastructure as code and automate deployments using pluggable plugins. It supports multiple languages, including JavaScript, TypeScript, Python, Go, and Dart. Key features include defining APIs (REST, HTTP), serverless functions, routing, authentication/authorization (OIDC-compatible), storage (object/file storage, signed URLs, bucket events), databases (e.g., managed Postgres with migrations), messaging (queues, topics, pub/sub), websockets, scheduled tasks, and secrets management. Nitric integrates with tools like Terraform or Pulumi, or lets you write your own plugins, and works with major cloud providers (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud). It also supports local development with simulated cloud environments so you can prototype, test, and iterate without incurring cloud cost. The framework emphasizes declarative security, resource access management, and portability.

Flue is an open agent framework for building durable AI agents with a programmable TypeScript harness. Created by the team behind Astro, it uses a React-like hooks API to compose agent behavior, persistent state, lifecycle events, models, tools, sandboxes, subagents, skills, and MCP servers in code. Agents are stateful and addressable over HTTP, keep context across conversations and events, and can change capabilities as work progresses. Flue records every session in a durable stream, so accepted work survives crashes, restarts, and deploys; interrupted sessions resume automatically and clients reconnect without starting over. Developers can run agents locally, in CI, from their own backend, or orchestrate them with systems such as Cloudflare Workflows and Inngest. Secure sandboxes let agents run commands, edit files, and do real work, while tools connect them to APIs and data. Flue is powered by Pi and supports different LLM providers, allowing teams to choose the models they want.