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Ask HN: What stack should I use to build my basic web app as of 3/29/18
Maybe we can make this a monthly thing, lol :-)
- harperlee 9y agoWhatever stack you know the best. The technology really doesn't matter a lot, compared to a lot of other success criteria. Unless the objective is to learn - then picking the one that you know best is not a good strategy :)
- NicoJuicy 9y agoThis would be my answer every month ( after you this time ;))
- stevekemp 9y agoMine too :) Most of my applications are built using Perl and the excellent CGI::Application module/framework. I've used Dancer a couple of times, but that tends to be for smaller applications, and it has to be said that the last remaining dancer application I used in production was replaced by a port to golang this morning. Partly for a fun learning experience, and partly to simplify deployment. For new projects, if they were small and self-contained, I'd probably gamble on golang. If they were more complex, or I was in a rush, I'd use Perl.
- vgy7ujm 9y agoGolang for components that need the speed, Perl for the rest. Mojolicious is my preferred Perl framework.
- vgy7ujm 9y agoWhat happened to Slaughter? Except for perhaps an unfortunate name it was an interesting project. I can see that all links to it doesn't work anymore..
- stevekemp 9y agoIt didn't seem to get much traction, so I stopped work on it. A few years later I removed references to it, but I still have the repositories if users do query me. My recollection is that modules that are removed from CPAN are still mirrored, so they should still be available, but I admit I've not checked recently.
- vgy7ujm 9y agoFor reference the latest App::Slaughter can be found here: http://backpan.perl.org/authors/id/S/SK/SKX/ http://backpan.perl.org/authors/id/S/SK/SKX/ Why not put it back on Github? I always find it interesting to look on other projects when I have an idea etc. Deprecated or not. I am getting tired of puppet/ansible and dream of the pure Perl + Shell world I used to live in. :)
- emily-c 9y agoThere really aren't any wrong answers here but I've had good personal experience with Vue, Go, and Postgres. Make sure you use vue-cli. vuefire is also very convenient if you're so inclined.
- BoorishBears 9y agoI’ll throw a hat in the ring for WebGL+WebAssembly and x86 assembly on the server
- rjbwork 9y agoThis guy, what a forward thinker!
- julvo 9y agoDo I sense a bit of sarcasm regarding longevity of JS frameworks here? As other commenters say, if you want results, choose whatever stack you are most productive with. As you say 'basic' web app: I'd recommend using Firebase, if you are comfortable with the vendor lock-in. For auth, database and deployment it doesn't get much simpler than this.
- abdhass 9y agoI use Firebase too along with a simple Vue.js setup. So easy and quick to get up and running.
- gremlinsinc 9y agoStrapi is something I've been looking at as a self-hosted firebase competitor for just an api for mobile apps, etc.. It's pretty cool, when I don't want to build out a full-fledge laravel app.
- tomkinson 9y agoEntirely depends on what you're building. If it's crazy complex go native now. Super complex web apps are as the rarest of the rare, and damn near impossible. Like a handful ever, rare. That's not to be said that it cannot be done. If it's medium to basic, use a framework like Vue or Preact and a VDOM. Everything will stem from that. Node.JS is a given, maybe Go, but all other decisions depend on what you are building.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- godzillabrennus 9y agoIf it's an MVP? Then anything you can use to stand up the mvp quickly.
- _Chief 9y agoGo for what works for you, a popular stack may not necessarily be best for you unless you, at least, have experience with the technologies. My current default stack. Frontend: Vuejs (pwa) Backend: Go (exposes json api endpoints for frontend) DB: mariadb / sqlite
- majewsky 9y ago> Backend: Go (exposes json api endpoints for frontend) Do you use Swagger or sth. like that to auto-generate the boilerplate from an API spec?
- mhd 9y agoBasic? You need good documentation, and Philip Greenspun's book is now available for free[1]! So go with that, although you might want to swap out Oracle with MySQL -- it's from the same company anyway! AOLServer is still fine.[2] [1]: http://philip.greenspun.com/panda/ http://philip.greenspun.com/panda/ [2]: https://github.com/aolserver/aolserver https://github.com/aolserver/aolserver
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- Guest9812398 9y agoI use a basic LAMP stack (CentOS, Apache, MariaDB, PHP 7). No frameworks. Some of my projects are quite large (tables with billions of rows, and over a million users). It might not be fashionable, but it works, it's fast (for development, and for end-users), it's well documented, and it's been tested for decades. I have no plans to change, and my new projects in development are using the same.
- gremlinsinc 9y agoThe problem with this is, when you pull in new developers - it takes them weeks or months to understand everything. Whereas a Laravel app, they need maybe a few days at best to figure out what design principles you're using and what style, and where you put repos/models and such, but then they're good to go. I hate working on code where some systems engineer from the 80's thinks they're big and bad and can code an awesome website using just propel + plain php and then expect every new dev to just learn it and love it as much as they do.
- tga 9y agohttp://djangoframework.com http://djangoframework.com is overall one of the best documented + most stable web frameworks out there. Besides the actual functionality, that you can also get from smaller libraries, you want a framework because it gives you standard go-to solutions for many common questions you encounter when making a basic, relational database backed application (database access, database migrations, templating, forms, validation, caching, translation, etc.)
- piker 9y agohttps://www.djangoproject.com/ https://www.djangoproject.com/ ?
- IshKebab 9y agoI've used Django and I liked it but it really was quite slow.
- Doxin 9y agoIf you feel like django is too big you'll probably like flask. It has the same functionality, except everything but responding to http requests is separated into 3rd party packages. Makes for a really lightweight framework if you don't need much.
- collyw 9y agoReally, I have been using Django for a while now. Its rarely the Django code that is the bottleneck, usually it needs some DB tuning. (If you don't know the ORM well, its easy to let it generate a LOT of queries, have you added django-debug-toolbar to your project to see what it is generating?)
- krob 9y agoI feel it's important to throw Laravel + Vuejs into the mix. It's an extremely powerful framework on the LAMP side of things, fully PHP 7.2+ functional, and continues to improve w/ every major iteration from JWT, oauth2, queue workflows, console utility workflows, ORM, DBAL, Migrations, mutli-database support via PDO, blade templates. It's pretty hard to go wrong.
- perilunar 9y ago3/29/18? What sort of date format is that? Regardless of your stack, use ISO 8601 for dates.
- cessor 9y agoThat's the third of Thunderfiretober of 2018, what's your problem, isn't that clear? ;) Playing devil's advocate here. This kind of date formatting is really confusing to me (German) and I almost overread that the question asked for the current en vogue tech...
- perilunar 9y ago> This kind of date formatting is really confusing to me You, me, and most of the world outside the USA. Check out the map here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_format_by_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_format_by_country
- hungerstrike 9y agoThat's one of the most common date formats used in the United States. Are you suggesting to use ISO 8601 format to display dates to users instead of the users local or preferred format?
- perilunar 9y agoYes. This site, like many, has a large international audience. Don't assume your local (and illogical) format is your users'. It just confuses people. Use an unambiguous format: use 8601 or spell out the month.
- hungerstrike 9y agoThat's my point exactly. It's an international audience but it's also an informal social environment where we can't expect everybody to be cognizant of that fact at every moment and make adjustments for it. As such, you shouldn't be too strict about what you feel is the "logical" way of doing things. Anyway, according to alexa, the great majority of HN readers are from the US - https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/ycombinator.com https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/ycombinator.com
- synack 9y agoWhat does the app do?
- plexjac 9y agoTry going through the comments and you will figure it out. Also go through https://www.tipsindeed.net https://www.tipsindeed.net
- gowk 9y agoYou can try Vue.js & Buffalo.
- Blackstone4 9y agoGraphQL stack :) Frontend: React + Apollo Client + Netlify Backend: Typescript + Node.js + Apollo Server (graphql-yoga) + Graphcool/Prisma + Apex Up to deploy to AWS Lambda + AWS RDS
- 1_player 9y agoWhere are the hipsters in this thread? Fine, I'll be the hipster. I've worked on pure PHP, Flask, Pyramid, Django, Laravel stacks, and I haven't warmed up to any of those. I'm in the vocal minority that says Django made me hate Python. So here's my stack for 2018: Elixir+Phoenix on the backend, GraphQL as API protocol, React (and Typescript?) on the frontend. Functional and immutable language on the backend + functionally-inspired data flow on the front end? Yes, please. Now, if I could have monadic constructs and better typing on Elixir I'd be in heaven.
- 80386 9y agoThis is maybe a stupid question, but why not Rails? I still use it as my go-to backend, but it seems to be out of fashion nowadays.
- joefarish 9y agoIf it's a basic CRUD app Rails would be a great option (Rails is good for a lot more than that of course!).
- tugberkk 9y agoI really think it depends on the programming languages you know, if you know any. For example, if you know Python, just use Django or Flask. If you know c#, just use that. However, if you don't know any programming languages and plan to do "just" web development, WAMP and MEAN stack is the way to go. edit: WAMP -> (XAMP)
- YouKnowBetter 9y agoAWS Serverless. Cheap, "fresh", and scalable in complexity with too many services to mention. It's easy, plenty of example code available and will get your feet wet in the hyped secdevops which might land you a nice project sooner or later.
- madmax108 9y agoThe correct answer as of ${any_date_in_any_esoteric_format} is: - It depends on what you are trying to build. Basic web app can be anything from a Trello clone to Instagram. Each has it's own limitations. - Go with what is tried and tested. Pick up something that is supported, where if you get stuck you can reach out to people for a fix. One of the few good things of the clusterfk that the current JS ecosystem is is that many many amazing developers who are extremely responsive to questions are part of it. That makes life just a little bit easier. - Use what you are comfortable with. Prefer a proper backend and frontend? Go for it. Everything in NodeJS is your cup of tea? Works just fine. In the end happy developer = productive developer. Just because assembly is 1000 times faster than Python does not mean you should code in assembly. Pick your tradeoffs.
- hungerstrike 9y agoI'm just wondering if you're not from the USA? Because that date format is very common here particularly for written dates. Whenever I write a check or sign and date something, that's how I write it.
- madmax108 9y agoNope I'm not, though I work at a company with 2 engineering offices in MV and Dallas. Just FYI: Other than the USA, this format is not used anywhere else: https://s3.amazonaws.com/stackabuse/media/date-formats-world.png https://s3.amazonaws.com/stackabuse/media/date-formats-world... Working with a global company, I tend to use 29 Mar 2018, which is much more unambiguous (and in code we usually use yyyymmdd, which makes it easier to search for logs/output of a year/month/day etc.).
- julienfr112 9y agoIf you know Python well, tornado + mongodb(motor) is pretty neat !
- amcca029 9y agohtml5 and nginx.
- slipwalker 9y agobackend on kotlin with (maybe) Spring 5; frontend with Angular 4 or Vue 2; datastore on apache cassandra ; mobile version with flutter/dart ?... probably cover all your bases for the stack-du-jour.
- quantumleap22 9y agoRails + intercooler.js gives you most of the functionality you need with a minimum of complexity.
- vatotemking 9y agoThe simplest stack for me is: Frontend - Plain HTML/CSS/JS Backend - Node, Express with Nunjucks for templating If I want to get a bit fancy: Frontend - Vue, Bootstrap4 Backend - Node, Express, Nunjucks DB - SQLite3 using Sequelize as ORM Surprisingly, you can accomplish lot of stuff with the second setup. If im going to deploy to production: Provider - Either small DO droplet ($5.00) or tiny AWS (free) Webserver - nginx as reverse proxy for node (free) Firewall - UFW (free) Email - mailgun (free) Domain - namecheap (depends on domain name. $10.00/yr more or less) For a basic setup you wont need any scaling setup (CDN, load-balancer and whatnot) which like what, 99% of the time?
- handbanana 9y agoI like that set up. For me its ejs over nunjucks. Mysql, and no ORM. I'd also probably use something like elastic beanstalk vs piecing it all together myself - to keep things simple. And I'd use sendgrid over mailgun, primarily for deliverability but also I find their service/api/dashboard very user friendly. If taking payments I'd use stripe
- WalterGR 9y agoCheck out this recent Ask HN: Ask HN: What stack would you use to build a CRUD web app in 2018? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16508965 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16508965 It has 177 comments and some good meaty answers.
- swat535 9y agoI am going to go against the grain here and say you should pick with whatever you are most skilled at and feels natural to you. Unless you have very specific requirements, it matters very little; especially if your goal is to push a product Nowadays there are many options and a lot of them are reliable. E.g Rails, PostgreSQL, React Django, PostgreSQL, VueJs Phoenix. PostgreSQL, Jquery
- gremlinsinc 9y agoBut you're saying back/frontends don't matter...but definitely use postgres... lol