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Ask HN: It's Jan 1 and you're building a new Saas app: What framework do you pick?

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Re: Ask HN: It's Jan 1 and you're building a new Saas app: What framework do you pick?

#21

Post by mindcrime »

I've been thinking about just this lately. I have an idea for a side project I want to kick-off, which will be mainly for A. to scratch an itch of my own, and B. learning. So I'm looking at it as a chance to just pick something and run with it.

For backend code, I'll almost certainly stick with Grails, but for the client side, I'm waffling between Angular and React.

Why Grails? It's what I know and like, and it works well. I can be productive with it, and I have something of an interest in promoting its use. I'm think that if I do some cool project using, say, React + Grails, that might turn into a cool talk for the local Groovy + Grails Meetup, etc.

Why Angular or React? Both are pretty modern, pretty popular, and claim to offer some real productivity boost compared to rolling everything by hand. Both seem to have plenty of traction and mindshare, and learning resources are available. I guess the same could be said of Ember and some others, but I kinda feel like the future right now is either React or Angular.

A third option would be to go with either Meteor or Node for the entire stack. And I am interested in learning both of those platforms, but not quite as willing to invest time and energy in them right this minute.

Re: Ask HN: It's Jan 1 and you're building a new Saas app: What framework do you pick?

#24

Post by raquo »

_RPM wrote: post #23

Off topic, but I can't believe how many people are using "Laravel". It is probably the most bloated PHP framework in existence. [Serious, Not trolling]

There's nothing inherently wrong with using a full-featured framework like Laravel or Rails. It saves time, and backend performance is not always a dealbreaker (small projects, caching, etc).

Besides, is there a good PHP micro-framework comparable to say Flask? I've tried a couple and it was not worth my time. Flask is useful because it's well architected for its purpose, has a big helpful community, lots of extensions, extensive documentation, etc.

Like someone else said here, Flask with SQLAlchemy and a few Flask-* extensions will give any full featured framework a run for its money, not so with any PHP microframework that I know of.

Re: Ask HN: It's Jan 1 and you're building a new Saas app: What framework do you pick?

#26

Post by JohnHaugeland »

TL,DR: Node, Erlang, React, Flocks.JS, MySQL, and CloudFront.

For the frontend, I am writing a routable, cached SPA in React and d3, orchestrated with Flocks, stored in S3 and fronted with CloudFront, generated by Node, backed with MySQL (because it has semi-mature clustering.)

For the backend, I use a custom Erlang stack built on htstub and emysql.

The build process is orchestrated with gulp, uses eslint, vows, karma, and jsverify for testing, travis ci for CI/CD, and deploys automatically on full test passing. (I have extensive test coverage.)

I can use remarkably few tools to get the results I want. I am happy with the stack.

I have an alternative approach to handling multiple interfaces, as a replacement for responsive. I don't use media queries to do that. Instead I have a top level React layout control, and which top level control is invoked is based on the client. The same goal is suited, but it isn't jury rigged through CSS.

Re: Ask HN: It's Jan 1 and you're building a new Saas app: What framework do you pick?

#27

Post by izolate »

reverius42 wrote: post #22

Node.js + Express on the backend. React.js, Flux, Bootstrap on the frontend.

Similar to mine: Node.js/Express.js/MongoDB (backend); Stylus/Jade/jQuery/Webpack (frontend)

Cannot think of a faster way to get from 0 to 1.0.

Re: Ask HN: It's Jan 1 and you're building a new Saas app: What framework do you pick?

#28

Post by sheraz »

larryweya wrote: post #9

Already building one on Laravel 4.x and React for the front-end. Have a background with Django and my personal favorite Pyramid but Laravel really cuts down the boilerplate for me.

Funny -- I'm going the opposite direction. I did a few MVPs last year on Laravel which have since moved to Django or Flask.

There is no admin generator I've found that compares to Django. And it is that time savings that is crucial in the beginning. It is shaping up to look like this:

Django and all the goodies on the backend (db migrations, admin generator, auth, rest-framwork)

Flask + SQLAlchemy OR Django-rest-framwork on the Frontend.

Sure, we might double-up on some models (Django models and SQLAlchemy models), but this works really really well.

I would argue that this is even better than using a BaaS for prototyping.

Re: Ask HN: It's Jan 1 and you're building a new Saas app: What framework do you pick?

#30

Post by molotv »

Popping back in the thread to say "thank you" to everyone who contributed so far - this has given me a lot to research and think about.

From a product management perspective, Laravel is tempting - I certainly get that it could seem bloated, but some of that seems quite useful for getting to MVP quickly - the user auth and billing especially.

I'm considering Postgres / Laravel / Bootstrap (already have a clickable HTML prototype underway) to be replaced by Angular post-MVP, but I'll probably noodle on that last bit some more when the time comes to make that call.

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