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Ask HN: What stack would you use to build a CRUD web app in 2018?

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Re: Ask HN: What stack would you use to build a CRUD web app in 2018?

#91
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need neither JS nor CSS to build a simple CRUD app. Just use the server technology of your liking and a database. Sure, it will look ugly but so did apps 20 years ago. The landscape got complicated because now we build beautiful and elaborate things. We have apps that serve hundreds if not thousands of users simultaneously. Modern databases get hammered with requests every single second. What was the average case…

> The landscape got complicated because now we build beautiful and elaborate things As someone who works at a large company which has TONS of crud web apps, let me just say ... No. We don't. We build ugly disasters, badly, with loads of bugs and unusable interfaces. And of course, only very rarely are 2 crud apps built using the same stack. We have everything from Oracle WebForms to Ruby on Rails, to AngularJS on Nod…

As someone who builds SaaS sites the shit I build now are miles more elegant and functional than the apps I used to build back in the Visual Basic days, or even earlier when I was writing software for DOS. We may bitch and moan all we like but the fact is that the average web app of today is way more usable than the average windows app some twenty years ago.

I won't argue that the situation with web development is ludicrous, we have a bazillion of js frameworks that last no more than two to three years until the next shinny thing pops-up not to mention changes in pretty much every aspect of the stack, from devops to server-side languages and whatnot.

As a testament, take a look at the available dashboard templates in the major template sites. Some of them are so beautiful they make me droll. We never had so gorgeous interfaces in recent history.

Of course as always YMMV.

Re: Ask HN: What stack would you use to build a CRUD web app in 2018?

#93

You should not write a CRUD app in 2018. Update and delete are remnants from the times where memory and disk were expensive, and update in place was a necessity. This is no longer the case. Apart from a few very specialised use cases, there is no need any more for update or delete. Record new facts and don’t destroy the older ones.

This is not true generally anyway (in most mainstream systems it is much simpler to update or delete when appropriate), but please consider e.g. the GDPR where the ability to delete personal data is mandatory, and the "keep everything forever" mindset is precisely what that legislation is designed to remedy.

Re: Ask HN: What stack would you use to build a CRUD web app in 2018?

#95

Golang for the API, running on Lambda. React or Vue for the UI. FaaS isn’t a fad, new systems built on an event based architecture are simpler, more cost effective, and scalable than the traditional application server approach. And the reactive programming pattern is easy and powerful and maps extremely well to modern UI needs. I have a boilerplate Go / Lambda app here: https://github.com/nzoschke/gofaas I use it wit…

How is Lambda better than a PaaS like Appengine(not that appengine would be a good choice) for CRUD apps ?

Re: Ask HN: What stack would you use to build a CRUD web app in 2018?

#96
Whatever you're experienced with. I know it's nice to write a backend in js and easy to learn Python, but if all you ever did is writing C#, then there's nothing wrong with using it. You only know jQuery? Don't worry, you're probably being paid for the result and not for using React. (This is obviously not true if you want to learn new technologies)

Re: Ask HN: What stack would you use to build a CRUD web app in 2018?

#99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is anvil a hosted service ? Can I host my own apps, preferably by just dropping them into some folder and giving them a database ?

Yep, it's a hosted service - you can publish your app with one click! Self-hosting requires an on-site Anvil installation. This is because many of the things we do to make things easy (eg returning live database rows from server to client in a function call, then manipulating them directly there) require server-side report. We think it's worth it - for example, it saves you building a new REST API each time you blow…

While Anvil sounds interesting, one thing that pops to mind before buying into such a technology is "what are the limitations?" Could I build a multi-tenant app? Can I integrate JS components, like a sophisticated datagrid? Will I be able to query the DB with SQL as I wish? Does it use AJAX behind the scenes to speed up the responses? etc.

Re: Ask HN: What stack would you use to build a CRUD web app in 2018?

#100
I've been using:

Server side: Apache Web Server CouchDB Perl or Python

Client side: Pouchdb jQuery Bootstrap Moustache/Handlebars

On client side that toolset provides an almost seamless API that gets you authorization, authentication, offline/mobile first, and data sync among all connected devices. And it's a very fast app because it runs almost entirely on the client side and transfers very little data between the client and server.

There's not a lot to do on the server side with this setup. PouchDB/CouchDB work together to handle the CRUD routines for both the client and server side and to sync data automatically and/or on-demand when the client is online.

You can also setup a 2nd CouchDB on a remote server to replicate your data to for automated backups. And it's fairly easy to configure a cluster of CouchDB servers with load balancing.

Productivity is what we're really looking for in a framework. To achieve that you want a very low learning curve and a very rich feature set. You want to leverage what you already know, as opposed to "learning a new way" to do things.

For me, this "stack" provided that.

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