6 ms·

Ask HN: What's the lowest churn web stack?

23 points by xupybd 6y ago

Have you found a web stack you love that suffer from churn. I'm starting to realise the inefficiencies in keeping JS tooling up to date is a massive drain on resources. Is there a better option?

Nextgrid 6y ago
Anything server-side-rendered is going to be low churn compared to the JS world. My backend framework of choice is Django.
- erlich 6y ago
  Django definitely. Try find a stable ORM for JS - impossible!
  - aeoleonn 6y ago
    Knex.JS http://knexjs.org/ http://knexjs.org/ ?
    - erlich 6y ago
      Not an ORM and no integration with typescript. But yeh it’s a cool library that I’ve used a lot. I’m not sure how maintained it is though these days.
      - runawaybottle 6y ago
        Is Prisma not an orm? I feel like that’s a been getting the most attention lately.
      - aeoleonn 6y ago
        There's "Bookshelf" -- "Bookshelf is a JavaScript ORM for Node. js, built on the Knex SQL query builder." https://bookshelfjs.org/ https://bookshelfjs.org/ Here's "An example REST API using Typescript, Koa, Bookshelf, Knex, Postgresql." https://github.com/jpchip/bookshelf_demo https://github.com/jpchip/bookshelf_demo
  - pnwhyc 6y ago
    True. But after spending a long time looking for the “JavaScript Rails”, I realized that I didn’t actually need an ORM. Learning SQL is just as difficult as learning a new ORM’s API. Slonik + Postgres + Graphile is now my go-to.
redis_mlc 6y ago
Been using vanilla-js for over 20 years with server-side rendered web applications. Almost no churn. Only thing missing is a nice password dialog, so drop a link if you know one.
erlich 6y ago
Use create-react-app and don’t eject or add any fancy custom tooling. Nest.js is pretty good on the backend.
- rocketpastsix 6y ago
  >don’t eject or add any fancy custom tooling Doesn't React require the latest and greatest in build tooling to make it work?
  - erlich 6y ago
    CRA includes all tooling it needs and makes sure there is a clear and smooth update path.
  - runawaybottle 6y ago
    No.
rocketpastsix 6y ago
PHP has calmed quite down over the years. The framework wars have been mostly decided between a handful of them, we dont have much in the way of package management issues and you dont have to compile it.
- npsomaratna 6y ago
  Yup, this is why we use PHP/Laravel for our stuff. Stable language + powerful framework = can focus on solving business problems.
newfeatureok 6y ago
EmberJS is probably the most stable of the frontend frameworks in that it's very internally consistent and opinionated. As far as the back-end goes, I think PHP, Rails and Django are all pretty stable, but I'm not familiar with the microsoft stack.
nicoffeine 6y ago
Recently we were considering flutter web. Dart/flutter seem to be more "batteries included" than npm dependency hell, but it's still in beta. https://flutter.dev/web https://flutter.dev/web https://github.com/DroidsOnRoids/flutter-roadmap https://github.com/DroidsOnRoids/flutter-roadmap
juststeve 6y ago
spring?
aprdm 6y ago
Django / Ruby On Rails
- viraptor 6y ago
  We just got RoR 6 and Ruby 3 this year. It's not a massive change, but there is a constant churn. Especially with gems updating to support both.
evv555 6y ago
React with Django handling url routing and user sessions. Single page applications reduce footprint of javascript tooling.
billisonline 6y ago
I would put Laravel/PHP against anything else out there right now. Based on my (albeit limited) experiences with Node.js and Java/SpringBoot, I would choose Laravel for the vast majority of applications.
zozbot234 6y ago
> What's the lowest churn web stack? cgi-bin/ obviously. But sometimes you can get away with just public_html.
muttantt 6y ago
SPA w/ AngularJS 1.x and Flask on the backend.
midrus 6y ago
In my opinion: Ruby On Rails. It has an awesome community, lots of gems (libraries) for web stuff. An opinionated way of doing frontend and backend. No waste of time taking decisions about what state management to use, how to organize stuff, etc. Just focus on stable, accepted, well maintained conventions and focus on your business problems instead. It might be harder to find people interested in working with it depending where you are, but I guarantee you that you will need a lot less people to build the same thing with lower level tools (SPAs, Go, Erlang, Rust, whatever...). I would also say Django, but the problem with it is that it just solves the backend side of things. You will still have to find an answer for how to do the frontend as it has no opinions there (and the templating and forms stuff it has built in falls really short in my experience). I've heard good things about php/symfony, but never used it myself.
- overscore 6y ago
  Interesting. In your opinion, is it worth learning RoR over Django? I'm historically a Python dev, but find Django and Python web development in general a very poor experience.
  - midrus 6y ago
    Absolutely. I've used django professionally for about 8 years and I agree with you. Python (and django) is great but solves only the backend side of things. Things that are by far superior in Rails in my opinion: * It is a real full stack solution. From migrations to css to credentials storage to assets compilation to file uploads to rich text editing to we sockets, etc. * Ruby might not be as popular as python, but it is a lot better designed (and a lot more consistent). * Gems/bundler and everything about packaging works a lot better. * The routing, controllers and validations make a lot more sense to me The only thing I like more from django is the built in admin. Although there are also external gems for rails which provide same functionality for rails.
    - overscore 6y ago
      Thanks for your response - very informative!
runawaybottle 6y ago
I mean I always use a simple express server for json api/websockets/some routes for auth, static assets behind cdn. Where is the churn here? You can swap out the frontend end for whatever framework you want, your api layer is thin, you can swap that out too. Where are you guys getting trapped in churn? The server side rendering bullshit?
butnotforgotten 6y ago
Clojure/Script and libraries
gls2ro 6y ago
I recommend (subjectively of course) Ruby on Rails. It is a full-stack offering together with Ruby Gems ecosystem solutions to a wide range of things that I want to achieve with a webapp. I like a lot how people in this community tries to simplify a lot of the complexities of modern tools. In the Ruby (and Rails ecosystem) you should take a look at https://hotwire.dev https://hotwire.dev - helping create amazing web apps with less Javascript code. There are a lot of things to like there, but you can start small with Stimulus JS, which for me offers good enough JS code to do small UI things. Then there is https://docs.stimulusreflex.com https://docs.stimulusreflex.com - for creating reactive web apps without going full SPA mode. And here it is the latest addition to this eco-system (that I know of): https://github.com/rails/tailwindcss-rails https://github.com/rails/tailwindcss-rails. This is integrating Tailwind directly in assets pipeline of Rails. No need to configure webpack and postcss and whatever other configs. You can directly use Tailwind by adding this gem.
chrisrickard 6y ago
Rails, PHP, or Django. Tried and tested, strong communities.

23 points by xupybd 6y ago

Have you found a web stack you love that suffer from churn. I'm starting to realise the inefficiencies in keeping JS tooling up to date is a massive drain on resources. Is there a better option?

Nextgrid 6y ago

Anything server-side-rendered is going to be low churn compared to the JS world. My backend framework of choice is Django.

erlich 6y ago
Django definitely. Try find a stable ORM for JS - impossible!
- aeoleonn 6y ago
  Knex.JS http://knexjs.org/ http://knexjs.org/ ?
  - erlich 6y ago
    Not an ORM and no integration with typescript. But yeh it’s a cool library that I’ve used a lot. I’m not sure how maintained it is though these days.
    - runawaybottle 6y ago
      Is Prisma not an orm? I feel like that’s a been getting the most attention lately.
    - aeoleonn 6y ago
      There's "Bookshelf" -- "Bookshelf is a JavaScript ORM for Node. js, built on the Knex SQL query builder." https://bookshelfjs.org/ https://bookshelfjs.org/ Here's "An example REST API using Typescript, Koa, Bookshelf, Knex, Postgresql." https://github.com/jpchip/bookshelf_demo https://github.com/jpchip/bookshelf_demo
- pnwhyc 6y ago
  True. But after spending a long time looking for the “JavaScript Rails”, I realized that I didn’t actually need an ORM. Learning SQL is just as difficult as learning a new ORM’s API. Slonik + Postgres + Graphile is now my go-to.

redis_mlc 6y ago

Been using vanilla-js for over 20 years with server-side rendered web applications. Almost no churn. Only thing missing is a nice password dialog, so drop a link if you know one.

erlich 6y ago

Use create-react-app and don’t eject or add any fancy custom tooling. Nest.js is pretty good on the backend.

rocketpastsix 6y ago
>don’t eject or add any fancy custom tooling Doesn't React require the latest and greatest in build tooling to make it work?
- erlich 6y ago
  CRA includes all tooling it needs and makes sure there is a clear and smooth update path.
- runawaybottle 6y ago
  No.

rocketpastsix 6y ago

PHP has calmed quite down over the years. The framework wars have been mostly decided between a handful of them, we dont have much in the way of package management issues and you dont have to compile it.

npsomaratna 6y ago
Yup, this is why we use PHP/Laravel for our stuff. Stable language + powerful framework = can focus on solving business problems.

newfeatureok 6y ago

EmberJS is probably the most stable of the frontend frameworks in that it's very internally consistent and opinionated. As far as the back-end goes, I think PHP, Rails and Django are all pretty stable, but I'm not familiar with the microsoft stack.

nicoffeine 6y ago

Recently we were considering flutter web. Dart/flutter seem to be more "batteries included" than npm dependency hell, but it's still in beta. https://flutter.dev/web https://flutter.dev/web https://github.com/DroidsOnRoids/flutter-roadmap https://github.com/DroidsOnRoids/flutter-roadmap

juststeve 6y ago

spring?

aprdm 6y ago

Django / Ruby On Rails

viraptor 6y ago
We just got RoR 6 and Ruby 3 this year. It's not a massive change, but there is a constant churn. Especially with gems updating to support both.

evv555 6y ago

React with Django handling url routing and user sessions. Single page applications reduce footprint of javascript tooling.

billisonline 6y ago

I would put Laravel/PHP against anything else out there right now. Based on my (albeit limited) experiences with Node.js and Java/SpringBoot, I would choose Laravel for the vast majority of applications.

zozbot234 6y ago

> What's the lowest churn web stack? cgi-bin/ obviously. But sometimes you can get away with just public_html.

muttantt 6y ago

SPA w/ AngularJS 1.x and Flask on the backend.

midrus 6y ago

In my opinion: Ruby On Rails. It has an awesome community, lots of gems (libraries) for web stuff. An opinionated way of doing frontend and backend. No waste of time taking decisions about what state management to use, how to organize stuff, etc. Just focus on stable, accepted, well maintained conventions and focus on your business problems instead. It might be harder to find people interested in working with it depending where you are, but I guarantee you that you will need a lot less people to build the same thing with lower level tools (SPAs, Go, Erlang, Rust, whatever...). I would also say Django, but the problem with it is that it just solves the backend side of things. You will still have to find an answer for how to do the frontend as it has no opinions there (and the templating and forms stuff it has built in falls really short in my experience). I've heard good things about php/symfony, but never used it myself.

overscore 6y ago
Interesting. In your opinion, is it worth learning RoR over Django? I'm historically a Python dev, but find Django and Python web development in general a very poor experience.
- midrus 6y ago
  Absolutely. I've used django professionally for about 8 years and I agree with you. Python (and django) is great but solves only the backend side of things. Things that are by far superior in Rails in my opinion: * It is a real full stack solution. From migrations to css to credentials storage to assets compilation to file uploads to rich text editing to we sockets, etc. * Ruby might not be as popular as python, but it is a lot better designed (and a lot more consistent). * Gems/bundler and everything about packaging works a lot better. * The routing, controllers and validations make a lot more sense to me The only thing I like more from django is the built in admin. Although there are also external gems for rails which provide same functionality for rails.
  - overscore 6y ago
    Thanks for your response - very informative!

runawaybottle 6y ago

I mean I always use a simple express server for json api/websockets/some routes for auth, static assets behind cdn. Where is the churn here? You can swap out the frontend end for whatever framework you want, your api layer is thin, you can swap that out too. Where are you guys getting trapped in churn? The server side rendering bullshit?

butnotforgotten 6y ago

Clojure/Script and libraries

gls2ro 6y ago

I recommend (subjectively of course) Ruby on Rails. It is a full-stack offering together with Ruby Gems ecosystem solutions to a wide range of things that I want to achieve with a webapp. I like a lot how people in this community tries to simplify a lot of the complexities of modern tools. In the Ruby (and Rails ecosystem) you should take a look at https://hotwire.dev https://hotwire.dev - helping create amazing web apps with less Javascript code. There are a lot of things to like there, but you can start small with Stimulus JS, which for me offers good enough JS code to do small UI things. Then there is https://docs.stimulusreflex.com https://docs.stimulusreflex.com - for creating reactive web apps without going full SPA mode. And here it is the latest addition to this eco-system (that I know of): https://github.com/rails/tailwindcss-rails https://github.com/rails/tailwindcss-rails. This is integrating Tailwind directly in assets pipeline of Rails. No need to configure webpack and postcss and whatever other configs. You can directly use Tailwind by adding this gem.

chrisrickard 6y ago

Rails, PHP, or Django. Tried and tested, strong communities.