Ask HN: Go-To Web Stack Today?

#1

Post by Calamity » Sat, Sep 18, 2021, 11:21 PM UTC

I'm an engineer who's just left academia where I spent most of my time programming in either Python or C++. Want to develop a web app in my spare time but getting analysis paralysis trying to decide on a stack.

Having looked into it a bit, I was thinking something along the lines of Vue.js / Django / PostgreSQL to leverage my familiarity with Python.

On the other hand, React & Next.js on Vercel seems to be buzzing. Is that just me or is something similar what webdev is moving towards?

Re: Ask HN: Go-To Web Stack Today?

#2

Post by NicoJuicy » Sat, Sep 18, 2021, 11:38 PM UTC

Pick the hyped stack if you want to learn.

Pick the tools that you're comfortable with if you want to finish.

Re: Ask HN: Go-To Web Stack Today?

#3

Post by Calamity » Sat, Sep 18, 2021, 11:52 PM UTC

NicoJuicy wrote: post #2

Pick the hyped stack if you want to learn. Pick the tools that you're comfortable with if you want to finish.

Thanks for the brutally honest reply :) I guess part of my question is Django still as relevant today or is it losing 'market share' and finding devs to help out in the future is going to prove a lot more difficult.

Re: Ask HN: Go-To Web Stack Today?

#4

Post by PaulHoule » Sun, Sep 19, 2021, 12:07 AM UTC

I write all kinds of low-volume webapps (e.g. for my personal use) that I use for things like workflow applications, classifying objects and controlling IoT devices.

I think it is fun to do this with asyncio in Python, particularly building systems that (say) communicate in real time listening to websockets, AQMP and some other sockets at the same time.

Every team I've been on for the last 10 years or so has used the JVM (either Java, Scala, or Kotlin code) for the back end. The strength of the JVM is that it handles parallelism and concurrency. It doesn't just claim to exploit processors with a many cores, it really does. (Before that I worked on a C# project which is almost the same.)

Python, node.js and similar things don't have a good multicore story so they are not going to hold up to heavy use.

Re: Ask HN: Go-To Web Stack Today?

#5

Post by Calamity » Sun, Sep 19, 2021, 12:23 AM UTC

PaulHoule wrote: post #4

I write all kinds of low-volume webapps (e.g. for my personal use) that I use for things like workflow applications, classifying objects and controlling IoT devices. I think it is fun to do this with asyncio in Python, particularly building systems that (say) communicate in real time listening to websockets, AQMP and some other sockets at the same time. Every team I've been on for the last 10 years or so has used the…

Interesting, thanks for the feedback. Didn't even consider the whole innate multicore support.

Re: Ask HN: Go-To Web Stack Today?

#6

Post by wrycoder » Sun, Sep 19, 2021, 12:38 AM UTC

Svelte on the frontend and Fiber on the backend.

Re: Ask HN: Go-To Web Stack Today?

#7

Post by linsomniac » Sun, Sep 19, 2021, 12:49 AM UTC

I've really enjoyed Flask and Quart (asyncio Flask) for my smaller tool sort of web services as the backend. It can run either self-contained, via uwsgi.

For the frontend component, I'd probably be looking at Vue in the future, I haven't done much on that front.

My most recent toy was replacing the backend of MailHog with Python, the existing one has been flaky for us I'm not the right guy to fix Java. So I built a Quart app with aiosmtpd to make a single program that could process SMTP and HTTP to show the incoming messages in a browser. Used for dev/staging environment to capture and view the messages our system would send out.

Re: Ask HN: Go-To Web Stack Today?

#8

Post by mod » Sun, Sep 19, 2021, 1:30 AM UTC

Calamity wrote: post #3

NicoJuicy wrote: post #2

Pick the hyped stack if you want to learn. Pick the tools that you're comfortable with if you want to finish.

Thanks for the brutally honest reply :) I guess part of my question is Django still as relevant today or is it losing 'market share' and finding devs to help out in the future is going to prove a lot more difficult.

It's python, any competent dev can pick it up very quickly.

I would additionally advise dropping the front end Javascript stack. Serve rendered HTML and CSS as much as possible.

Re: Ask HN: Go-To Web Stack Today?

#9

Post by amerkhalid » Sun, Sep 19, 2021, 1:38 AM UTC

Calamity wrote: post #3

NicoJuicy wrote: post #2

Pick the hyped stack if you want to learn. Pick the tools that you're comfortable with if you want to finish.

Thanks for the brutally honest reply :) I guess part of my question is Django still as relevant today or is it losing 'market share' and finding devs to help out in the future is going to prove a lot more difficult.

I agree with OP, pick the hyped framework if you want to learn or get a job. If you want to build then use tools you are comfortable with. Django is not going away, I would say it would still be around in 10 years but latest hype framework is less likely to be around in 10 years.

Even Nicolas Taleb talked about it in more general terms. Bible is more likely to be around in 2000 years than latest bestseller.

Re: Ask HN: Go-To Web Stack Today?

#10

Post by Calamity » Sun, Sep 19, 2021, 2:19 AM UTC

linsomniac wrote: post #7

I've really enjoyed Flask and Quart (asyncio Flask) for my smaller tool sort of web services as the backend. It can run either self-contained, via uwsgi. For the frontend component, I'd probably be looking at Vue in the future, I haven't done much on that front. My most recent toy was replacing the backend of MailHog with Python, the existing one has been flaky for us I'm not the right guy to fix Java. So I built a Q…

Say you wanted to recreate hackernews as a toy project - what stack would you use nowadays to achieve that most efficiently?