I’d start with rails. It stays out of the way while providing all the core features necessary to grow.
Ask HN: If you were to build a web app today what tech stack would you choose?
131–140 of 214 posts
Re: Ask HN: If you were to build a web app today what tech stack would you choose?
#132Go + htmlx + TiDb or YugabyteDB
Re: Ask HN: If you were to build a web app today what tech stack would you choose?
#133T3 stack with MUI deployed to vercel + Postgres (I use supabase) My latest projects are built with it, but I also use a very similar stack at my work so it’s easy to pick it up.
Also, this stack is free if using vercel + supabase until you reach an BIG userbase
Re: Ask HN: If you were to build a web app today what tech stack would you choose?
#134I might be the only one in here with an answer like this, but PowerShell and the Pode framework. I am super productive with it, as much so as in any other language, and it plays nice with the rest of my stack (Tailwind, HTMX, SQLite.) I can leverage the .NET framework and C# libraries when I need to and can iterate quickly. All of this runs on the latest version of Ubuntu LTS. Obviously, this won’t work for everyone…
Very nice. I used pode for for some of my infrastructure services. Anything to show?
Re: Ask HN: If you were to build a web app today what tech stack would you choose?
#135depends on the goal:
if the passion is to learn some new tech then well, there are lots of options, i'd pick something that i haven't worked with yet.
if it is something where the passion is in the content, i would use the same old stack that i used for my last few projects. in my case that is aurelia+custom backend which is a reusable object storage and user management platform, where i didn't need to add any project specific features for some time now.
if i could not use that backend, i would pick something that makes it easy to manage objects through a REST API.
if i had to evaluate a new framework then the main thing that i would look for is the ability to minimize or avoid any dependency on build tools.
unfortunately, with the rapid evolution in frontend frameworks there is also a rapid evolution in build tools. that just adds extra effort to maintain a site for more than a few years.
without buildtools getting in the way i can maintain a site with minimal effort, and i know it will still be running in a decade from now.
Re: Ask HN: If you were to build a web app today what tech stack would you choose?
#136Django with HTMX + Alpine on the frontend. Deployed as Docker container on a cheap VPS. It's boring, time tested but by Jove, does it get the job done fast. I'm building a B2B2C marketplace in my free time and I'm blown away by the practicality of this stack. Due to longevity of Django, every problem I encounter is just a search away. DRF makes it dead simple to add REST APIs. The Admin panel is a golden cherry on to…
Yeah, this is exactly what I do as well. I'd be curious to hear more about your deployment process, specifically how you get your Docker image onto the VPS. Do you just push to a registry like DockerHub and then pull it down on the VPS?
Re: Ask HN: If you were to build a web app today what tech stack would you choose?
#137LAMP. 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.
> I'm surprised that Java and modern C++ are not more popular. I know for large web applications, Java is popular in "enterprise" environments.
Java scales both up (Spring Boot, with it's many integrations) and down (Dropwizard, a bunch of popular packages, nice for simpler projects) pretty well, has a great runtime and the language itself is okay.
Also there's .NET, where everything seems to revolve more around ASP.NET and EF, but as a consequence feels less fragmented than things on the Java side. Performance is also nice (especially on Linux with Kestrel) and the tooling is nice.
Honestly, both seem a viable option for something with more typing and language guarantees, as well as on average having a bit better performance than some of the highly dynamic languages (at the expense of iteration speed early on in development).
That said, Go is probably also worth a look, the deployment situation there is way simpler.
Re: Ask HN: If you were to build a web app today what tech stack would you choose?
#138.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?
Linux exclusively - I detest Windows server, via docker.
I feel that it's actually quite rare to run modern .NET apps on Windows Server now.
Re: Ask HN: If you were to build a web app today what tech stack would you choose?
#139Just 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…
It's the inner child of developers. They feel the need/urge to show the world they can do it better than existing bloated thing. And they show it, and people jump on the shiny new train. Rinse and repeat. The problem is, those that could really make a dent are not present in this space :P.
Re: Ask HN: If you were to build a web app today what tech stack would you choose?
#140I used SvelteKit, but it would be nice if there was something like rails on top of SvelteKit that brought database connections / models, admin screens, etc.
SvelteKit is the best combination of front-and-backend in terms of performance and developer usability that I've found.