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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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41–50 of 214 posts

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

#41

Post by calvinmorrison »

depends on the app but Laravel + something.

It's all built in, you can buy packages that implement most SaaS features out of the box, authentication, 2 factor, all the crap you need is rolled in as packages.

I would stick with something like Orchid for admin type CRUD apps as there is ZERO html/js knowledge required.

for a public app - I would still use Orchid on the backend and then on the frontend use something simple with blade templates and controllers.

PHP is a lot better than it was, Laravel developers are easy to find, the stack is very well understood, and it's flexible enough to build whatever you want.

EDIT: I just wanted to add 99% of "apps" are not retail facing but are internal apps or business to business type apps that solve a specific business niche. For that, I only care about how fast and easy is it to stand up and implement that specific business logic.

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

#42

Post by modeless »

I just started trying out Bun and its focus on speed plus broad compatibility makes it an absolute pleasure to use so far. For hosting I haven't started yet but think I might try fly.io with LiteFS as database. Just for fun, I wouldn't choose it for a work project until I've tested it out.

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

#45

Post by karakanb »

Laravel Jetstream with Inertia + Postgres, for sure. It is the most productive setup I have found for myself as a solo dev trying to deliver a full web app. If it is more like a backend-only setup, an API or sth, I tend to default to Go these days due to the speed and ease of deployment.

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

#46

Post by exabrial »

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 has everything.

Honestly though, the vast majority of webapps I implement are "boring" and the technology behind them needs to be boring and focus on productivity and maintainability. For this I usually select JakarataEE and JSF/Primefaces. Component based frameworks like this are stupid easy to slap together forms and business processes for internal webapps.

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

#47

Post by scosman »

SvelteKit + hosted Postgres (supabase, neon)

Very fast to get going and nice developer experience. Love jamstack style hosting. Scales from simple static site generator that is free to host, to live APIs/dynamic pages, and back again without changing frameworks. Can make beautiful pages that load in 100ms and 30kb.

Currently using tailwind css because it also compiles (like svelte) and only ships what you use to the client.

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

#48

Post by martinald »

.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 you can go as "deep" as you want with middleware etc. Plus performance is extremely good, as is the deployment story with docker these days (having to use Windows server with .net Framework a few years ago was a nightmare, enough to put me off, but in .net core Linux is a first class citizen now).

Also the IDEs are great these days, especially rider.

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

#49

Post by dinkleberg »

Go using the Gin framework. I’d use SQLite until I had a compelling reason not to. Server side rendering using pongo2 templates. Vanilla js and Htmx where appropriate.

I’ve built several projects like this and just started another one and it is by far my favorite stack.

I don’t like spending time fighting frameworks, so I like to keep my stack as minimal as possible. Thankfully the Go ecosystem pretty uniformly shares that ideology.

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

#50

Post by d-z-m »

Go for backend, HTML template files for frontend + Alpine.js for reactivity. Probably custom/classless CSS as I'm falling out of love w/ Tailwind. Probably would deploy on EC2.

If I was trying to learn something new, I'd experiment with solid.js or htmx.

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