61–70 of 184 posts
Criteria I'd think about:
What is going to be easy for my organization to support (both operationally and with future code changes).
What do I know/want to learn? If the CRUD app is complicated, then I want a tech I know well. If the CRUD app is simple, then I may want to experiment with a different technology (again, within the organizational support guardrails).
I work with startups, so I make this decision every 2-3 weeks or so. Language: Python. Python is easy to learn for those that don't know it, and all-around liked. It's not hard to find engineers with existing experience if you need to grow. Framework: Django. Django does everything you might want in a framework. It scales with larger teams, and the admin is still one of its killer features. Frontend: SCSS/SASS, and v…
As a developer working with Rails (and previously Django), I'd love to try Phoenix/Elixir now. I'd probably find lots of great reasons why it's the best choice. And I won't be wrong. As an entrepreneur however, I would opt for Wordpress unless there's a clear, strong reason not to. I know it's a bit heretic here on HN, and I dislike PHP and working with Wordpress isn't fun at all. But they take the concept of "Batter…
I often meet people who want to use for their generic MVP or website, and seem quite eager to spend thousands on programmers replicating what you can easily find on WordPress. But even though I tell them they should buy a WordPress template closest to the result they want, and hire a programmer if they need to customize it (saving thousands of dollars and a while load of grief), quite a few simply don't believe it's…
"Practically speaking, this means that the market wants your website to be on WordPress and your technology stack to be something very, very mainstream, like Rails or PHP. That ensures that, when they want to hire someone to work with it, that person will exist in quantity and be inexpensive. The market highly dislikes software which is written in something more esoteric (the new Javascript hotness, Golang, Erlang, etc) because that adds substantial risk and cost to operating the business."
[0] https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/selling_s...
- Python / Node.js for the backend
- React.js (with Redux) / Angular for the front-end
- MySQL / Postgresql as the db
- Host on a digitalocean or linode VM
- ReactNative (if using React.js) for mobile apps, prefer to write native apps otherwise.
All of the above are proven technologies with Node.js giving an edge when it comes to real-time applications.
The hardest part I've found is in having a consistent design, marketing and branding strategy. Usually the inhouse designers are swamped and it gets really tricky for frontend developers to make the beautiful looking widgets that were designed in Adobe InDesign or whatever...
If I get money, refactor frontend to use react/redux.
On the back, if PHP/WordPress weren't a good fit, I'd rewrite in another language and have WordPress proxy the requests and cache the responses smartly (POST/DELETE/etc would invalidate the cache for GET) or something.
I don't understand why you'd want to start out with a complex stack. It locks you into a set of solutions when you don't even know the whole problem set yet. See what people give you money for and figure it out from there.
https://editor.datatables.net/
I have a license for the Editor and have to say it works very well. They have an online Generator that makes it easy to get started very quickly.
For a simple CRUD app the stack is irrelevant. You'll want to get to market as quickly as you can and that will be with the stuff you already know.
I know there's a lot of bias out there against PHP. But I would still use it over the alternatives, there's a large community. With excellent frameworks who do the heavy lifting for you. (Symfony, Laravel). Great support and tooling, a large recruiting base and easy to pick up.
I personally love using Drupal 8 (which is built with Symfony), it has an excellent database abstraction layer, you can easily swap MySQL out for Postgres for example. There's a lot of functionality built in, and very developer minded (compared to WP) with many extra 3rd party addons. It also has a proven track record with deployments from small SMB to large enterprise users. It can also easily be extended with any Symfony packages.
For front end, I swear by Ember.js it is a framework which makes a lot of important decisions for you. You don't loose time setting up your tooling, deployments, state management, ... A great community, many excellent add-ons. A proven track record (LinkedIn, Twitch, Apple Music, ...) And on top of that, it has been around for 6 years, and is still actively developed with regular releases, with a excellent deprecation support so you can easily upgrade to new versions.
Great question. The funny thing is, 6 years ago, if you'd ask the same question (and I'm guess that's what you're coming from) the go-to answer on HN would've been Rails / Django something. Where both will allow you to build a basic crud app in 20 minutes. Since then, everybody has gone heavily into various javascript stacks, and the norm has become to deal with 20 different packages to build (somewhat) the same thin…
I'm starting to wonder to what degree this is actually true.
Most people I know, all along the spectrum of 'computer literacy', complain about the slowness and brokenness of many sites and web apps. On the other hand I've never heard anyone complain about a lack of 'dynamism'.
To be clear, some degree of interactivity is often useful. But I can't help but feel that it's quite often not at all necessary to move things like routing, validation, and (almost) complete page changes to the client side, at least not as long as it increases complexity to such a degree.