Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 214 posts

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

#71

Post by MichaelNolan »

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.

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

#72

Post by ghusto »

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…

I'm in the same situation as you, but have what I think be an incredibly unpopular theory on why all those competing technologies exist: Everyone is trying to unsuccessfully patch JavaScript.

Every few years, a group thinks they're the ones with the one true ring, and try again.

Each new shiny seems to promote even poorer practices than the last, lowering both the bar and the barrier of entry further.

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

#74

Post by jcutrell »

Sinatra, flask, or Laravel. Something that gives me a direct control over routes and allows me to opt-in to magic when I want or need it. Dynamic language.

Depending on the frontend need, I might go with straight server rendering static pages. So often the big stack of rendering contexts and HOCs and blah blah blah just gets in the way. Rendering a view shouldn’t be difficult, and progressive enhancement is easier starting from strict HTML + well structured CSS.

I love React, I’d be happy to try Svelte… my fear in not doing that would be “when we eventually need it, it’s difficult to opt in progressively” (which is terrible).

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

#75

Post by gdiamos »

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…

I was in the same situation as you, and then I tried it a few years ago.

I realized that front end software is actually pretty shallow.

Design is important, deep, and requires talking to users, but once you have a design it is pretty straightforward to get the pixels into your favorite JavaScript/React/Vue/CSS/etc code base. Importantly, design is not about the code. Designers work in tools like Figma, not react.

Web frontend applications will then need to call into a backend. If you are doing anything computationally heavy or complex you are back in the world of normal software development.

I think this is why you see more full stack than frontend engineers.

If you are worried about it, I’d suggest trying a project. If it looks like crap, you probably need to get help from a designer or learn design, not figure out which web stack to use.

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

#76

Post by andrei_says_ »

it_citizen wrote: post #13
3ds wrote: post #4

Rails. It's all about developer comfort. ruby as a language is a delight to work with. Rails as a framework has all the features I need and then some more. Postgres as the database of course!

What would you use for the FE?

Rails’ Hotwire most likely.

Turbo gives regular server rendered pages the snappiness of an SPA with zero dev effort.

The latest Hotwire allows easy replacement or lazy loading of any portion of a page.

All while preserving 10x developer efficiency. There’s simply no other stack with similar productivity.

(Not the original poster but came to this thread with “Rails” as the answer)

Hotwire is backend agnostic. Laravel has adopted it as a front end solution too.

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

#77

Post by lucidone »

it_citizen wrote: post #13
3ds wrote: post #4

Rails. It's all about developer comfort. ruby as a language is a delight to work with. Rails as a framework has all the features I need and then some more. Postgres as the database of course!

What would you use for the FE?

.erb templates are just as good as they were a decade ago.

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

#79

Post by threatofrain »

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.

Astro is the PHP of JavaScript and it’s quite lovely.
Post reply on HN