Ask HN: If you were to build a web app today what tech stack would you choose? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: If you were to build a web app today what tech stack would you choose?

#101

Post by MH15 » Sun, Oct 29, 2023, 6:59 PM UTC

CharlesW wrote: post #81

I just went through this and settled on Vue, TypeScript, and Vite for a rewrite of a PHP app. I can recommend that stack. Vite and TypeScript were new to me. I'd briefly used a older version of Vue for something. I currently deploy to Vercel, but don't have any Vercel dependencies. I used Phind, ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot extensively in order to understand the "AI pair programming" experience. They were helpful for sugg…

Vite and Typescript are truly incredible. The state of frontend is improving somewhat.

Re: Ask HN: If you were to build a web app today what tech stack would you choose?

#102

Post by absqueued » Sun, Oct 29, 2023, 7:00 PM UTC

Lately its been Fastify, Postgres and Svelte Kit.

Also tried Remix for a few smaller projects - didnt really fly but was quick to develop.

Fastify has been game changer for me.

Re: Ask HN: If you were to build a web app today what tech stack would you choose?

#103

Post by catlover76 » Sun, Oct 29, 2023, 7:03 PM UTC

ACS_Solver wrote: post #65

Zealotux wrote: post #23

Just had been thinking about this today, the current state of web development is making me seriously depressed. I would pick what I'm most comfortable with, a simple monolithic Nest.js application running Fastify, with Postgres or SQLite, Dockerized, hosted on a predictably-priced host like Hetzner, and Ansible to automate everything. I know that stack will give me plenty of headroom until I eventually need to scale…

The discussion is making me scared from another perspective. I have experience with a pretty wide variety of development. I've worked with embedded microcontrollers (minimalistic RTOS), embedded applications (on top of a proper Linux), desktop applications in Java and in C#, some C++ work, gamedev and more. But to this day I haven't touched Web apps. I have not written a line of JS and the closest I've done to modern…

> Does Web development in 2023 not have 2-3 tech stacks that dominate?

no

> Are the existing frameworks/techs so lacking that new ones keep appearing to address those problems?

The existing frameworks are fine. Most languages have just 1 or 2 frameworks for you to build in that language.

The problem child for all of this is the JavaScript ecosystem. A lot of developers in that space just keep proliferating a bunch of heavy-handed frameworks that do not accomplish anything new, but represent some opinionated take on architecture, tooling, etc., and which obfuscate everything behind layers of magic and indirection.

> Is there a high rate of change because things keep improving?

For the most part, I wouldn't say things are "improving" that much. I mean, React and Vue and Svelte are better for front-end development than what came before, for sure, but, speaking at least re: React, it's become a bit of a monstrosity. Pluses and minuses, I suppose.

Again, the problem is mostly in JS land. They are a little like the stereotype of Java devs, in some ways.

Re: Ask HN: If you were to build a web app today what tech stack would you choose?

#104

Post by catlover76 » Sun, Oct 29, 2023, 7:05 PM UTC

edg5000 wrote: post #56

edent wrote: post #16

LAMP. It can easily be maintained by a single developer. Scales well enough for a decent number of users. Huge ecosystem of components. Easy to deploy to literally any web host. Wide variety of front-end systems. If you need to scale, it can do that. Developers for it are plentiful. But you can always rewrite it in the flavour-of-the-month framework when you hit either scale or money.

For anything that is anticipated to grow beyond a very small codebase, the lack of static checkability really becomes a pain with PHP. I'm surprised that Java and modern C++ are not more popular. I know for large web applications, Java is popular in "enterprise" environments.

There are other statically typed languages that are more pleasant to work with.

Re: Ask HN: If you were to build a web app today what tech stack would you choose?

#105

Post by nathants » Sun, Oct 29, 2023, 7:13 PM UTC

picking a stack isn’t enough. you need to codify it and build tooling around it so you can completely forget how it works. picking it up cold after a year should be just as easy as picking it up from yesterday. mine is here[1].

1. https://github.com/nathants/aws-gocljs

Re: Ask HN: If you were to build a web app today what tech stack would you choose?

#106

Post by DeepSeaTortoise » Sun, Oct 29, 2023, 7:18 PM UTC

SwiftyBug wrote: post #98

andrewstuart wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly this, but I’d only deploy to a simple cloud virtual machine, and not from AWS, Azure or GCP…. 9 cents a gigabyte is crazy.

What's a simple cloud virtual machine?

Damn kids and their "Docker, docker-compose, AWS EC2 or Lightsail, Digital Ocean droplets, Netlify, Render"

just give me a simple VPS

Re: Ask HN: If you were to build a web app today what tech stack would you choose?

#107

Post by harshalizee » Sun, Oct 29, 2023, 7:19 PM UTC

andrewstuart wrote: post #96

martinald wrote: post #48

.NET 8 for the backend, and then blazor webassembly for the front end if it's complicated, or just boring old server side rendering with htmx if it's not. I've seen a lot of projects fail/struggle in golang (package ecosystem is still missing a lot of basics imo) or nextjs (very buggy). .NET has been my secret weapon. It's boring, works really well, has a good ecosystem and asp.net is really well thought through and…

Do you deploy .NET on Windows or Linux?

You can deploy on both quite easily. The newer .NETs are properly multiplatform

Re: Ask HN: If you were to build a web app today what tech stack would you choose?

#108

Post by jmstfv » Sun, Oct 29, 2023, 7:19 PM UTC

I built my business on Rails/SQLite/Sidekiq+Redis.

Hetzner (bare metal) for hosting. Bash script for provisioning a server. Vanilla JavaScript only when necessary. Tailwind for design. nanoc for generating a static site.

If I were to start again, I'd pick the same stack again. It just works and gets out of the way.

Re: Ask HN: If you were to build a web app today what tech stack would you choose?

#109

Post by jareklupinski » Sun, Oct 29, 2023, 7:20 PM UTC

I've been meaning to try Django (mit Postgres) + HTMX + Alpine + Tailwind for a while, and while I don't typically write a django admin page, https://github.com/unfoldadmin/django-unfold at least puts them in the same box for me to start playing with

Re: Ask HN: If you were to build a web app today what tech stack would you choose?

#110

Post by RalfWausE » Sun, Oct 29, 2023, 7:25 PM UTC

Well, i am currently building a little App for my job that is also a bit of a passion project, well, i am building using the Internetcomputer and the motoko language in the backend and vanilla JS and html in the frontend.