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

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

#141

Post by j0hnyl »

HuwFulcher wrote: post #97
j0hnyl wrote: post #90

The last few web apps I've built: Flask / HTMX / Pico.css / Postgres or Sqlite Dockerized so that it's easy to spin up. Edit: Caddy for webserver.

Interesting that you mention Pico. I really like it (my personal site uses it) but it doesn’t strike me as the go to choice for a web app?

I guess my needs are relatively basic. I like that all I have to do is include it and things look presentable out of the box without me having to do much design work. What are your choices for more complex projects?

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

#144

Post by PH95VuimJjqBqy »

martinald wrote: post #138
andrewstuart wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I understand and agree with your sentiment but .net core on windows is definitely not rare. What's rare is asp.net windows developers knowing what a reverse proxy is (they typically install the asp.net core hosting packages).

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

#145

Post by nogridbag »

MichaelNolan wrote: post #71
exabrial wrote: post #46

For internet facing webapps where infinite customization of html/css is important: Jakarta EE: Java 17/CDI/Quarkus for the backend, HTMX for the frontend. Quarkus is now standards based and has a large community. Java executes at near CPP speed but with memory safety. Java has the literal best debugger in the industry and also the combination of CDI and Mockito make writing true unit tests easy and fast. It literally…

Are you sticking with java 17 for a specific reason instead of java 21/latest? Besides that I agree with everything you wrote, Java is an incredible ecosystem.

Quarkus only officially supported Java 21 a few days ago. I'm planning on upgrading our app this week.

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

#146

Post by mooreds »

Either one that I wanted to learn or one that I knew.

Which of those depends on whether the focus of the passion was exploration of new tech to make an impact on my understanding of tech or exploitation of existing tech to make an impact on the world.

If it was the former, today I'd probably learn Rust + whatever webapp stack is popular in that language. Seems to make some pretty interesting guarantees around programming and is blazing fast.

If it was the latter, I'd pick rails. Nothing in my experience beats rails for productivity for a bog standard webapp.

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

#147

Post by mooreds »

pelletier wrote: post #31

You mention it's a passion project. If technology is the center of that passion, then pick what you're passionate or curious about! If not: the tried but true Rails + Postgres. Add more things only when needed. For example Alpine.js if a bit of interaction that's not covered by Rails' Turbo. If the need for background processing arises, bring in the good_job gem, and there may be no need to deploy it separately at fi…

> For hosting I'm not quite sure these days. Heroku may be on life-support, but its feature-set covers most basis.

I'd probably start with Render for rails hosting these days. Seems to be the best heroku descendant.

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

#148

Post by mooreds »

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.

> Developers for it are plentiful.

It's been a hot minute since I was looking for PHP developers, but when I did, I saw a ton of folks with Wordpress experience. And not many others who had experience with traditional three tier applications, how to write a database query, separation of concerns and general software development.

Maybe I was looking in the wrong places.

Do you find that software engineers who work in PHP are prevalent?

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

#149

Post by appplication »

pabe wrote: post #26

Django + HTMX + SQLite or PostgreSQL Hosted on a virtual machine. ... Or the stack you're most efficient/ effective in. A short time-to-market is most important for learning. If you don't reach an audience, your project might bore you soon. Tech rarely is the holy grail to success.

I feel like I want to like htmx, and the concepts sound cool. But json is such a nice generic serialization format. Like my API can be in service of my frontend, but also other applications. While, unless I misunderstand it, htmx seems to philosophically believe the backend is the frontend.

Are there any patterns where you have an API with nice json payloads but also use htmx to push the rendering to backend? What do you do when you have users that just want basic data from the API? Do you add json endpoints, or is it more of a “fuck you learn how to accept html” situation?

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

#150

Post by quickthrower2 »

NextJS again!

I keep changing my mind. Part of me wants to use old school tech. But I do like the DX of Next.

NextJS tends to make sites that need JS on the front end. And probably bigger bundles than an old school MVC job. I will take that hit though for some of the positives of working in React and productivity and modernness and community of great work around React.

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