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Ask HN: What tech stack would you choose for a serious, long-term business app

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Re: Ask HN: What tech stack would you choose for a serious, long-term business app

#71
Appengine flex, Google Pub/sub, postgres, Java (doors open for kotlin in the future), lombok, Dropwizard, typescript, react, redux, redux-thunk,css-modules, hostedgraphite, sentry.io, circleci.com.

No ops team. Maybe replace Java/Dropwizard with more Typescript and express if the same people will do Frontend and backend.

That's my dream stack. I've used all of this at some point in my career and I really believe their drawbacks are very worth it.

Re: Ask HN: What tech stack would you choose for a serious, long-term business app

#72
post #4

Answer for your given question: Java + Oracle. They'll both be supported by legions of enterprise devs until shortly before the heat death of the universe. Real answer: it depends. You've told us nothing about your application's business requirements, operating environment, or staffing availability. I'd also caution on the idea "put aside what your devs are already familiar with" - different tech can give you differe…

I'd like to second the important of staffing. If we were in a perfect universe we could use domain oriented languages for every project because devs would be familiar and competent with them. Obviously that is not the case.

I know it's kind of cliché and in my last project it also wasn't soo bad, but Java is not something I associate with lean and nimble. I know, OP didn't ask for that - but it sounds like the inception phase of a product, and I can't imagine working any other way than "release early, release often". Long-time support viable? Very probable.

Re: Ask HN: What tech stack would you choose for a serious, long-term business app

#74
bballer start with requirements and then evaluate tools/stacks based on that. Your requirements will help guide your research of what's out there and is best for the job.

All technical disciplines use this approach including ours.

While it seems helpful and fun to see what other people are using, you'll come to find that it's just a salad of product names and marketing gibberish. ;)

Trust your process.

Re: Ask HN: What tech stack would you choose for a serious, long-term business app

#75
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you elaborate on the PaaS? I've been avoiding it, but partly that's perhaps because I'm a control freak and not for any particularly good reason.

Well, I should have probably distinguished between IaaS ans PaaS, but primarily intended to differentiate between either of these and the GP's advocacy of on-prem or colo. That is, I would advocate PaaS and IaaS over on-prem/colo, and how far you go towards PaaS is a matter of comfort. I do think that comes down to control though, and I actually can't think of a much better basis for the decision.

Ah, right. so a VPS or even a dedicated server would be considered IaaS?

Re: Ask HN: What tech stack would you choose for a serious, long-term business app

#76
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I should have probably distinguished between IaaS ans PaaS, but primarily intended to differentiate between either of these and the GP's advocacy of on-prem or colo. That is, I would advocate PaaS and IaaS over on-prem/colo, and how far you go towards PaaS is a matter of comfort. I do think that comes down to control though, and I actually can't think of a much better basis for the decision.

Ah, right. so a VPS or even a dedicated server would be considered IaaS?

Possibly. I think the line runs along how the resources are exposed. That is, if they are literally manageable as a service (e.g. via API or management console), then yeah.

No expert on the terminology here, though. Just how I understand the term.

Re: Ask HN: What tech stack would you choose for a serious, long-term business app

#78

We're developing "boring" business applications intended for long (~10y) use: - Kubernetes: provides a good abstraction for running multiple apps and services in a cloud, without vendor lock-in. - Postgres: proven reliability, best (free) relational db with lots of functionality - Clojure: expressive language with huge ecosystem of libraries (since all JVM packages are available) - ClojureScript: also a huge ecosyste…

I think the gRPC team/community has been fast at work on a Golang/Node/Java/Haskell + Docker RPC tool; maybe you'll find some insights at their 'grpc-ecosystem/grpc-gateway' or 'grpc/grpc-web' GitHub repo home pages -- for your API format. It might tie back nice and conveniently to Minikube and K8S -- if gRPC is compatible with Clojure (essentially Java?).

Re: Ask HN: What tech stack would you choose for a serious, long-term business app

#79
post #49
post #45

We're 99% Python but for an internal app I would probably go with Postgres, Memcached and Phoenix/Elixir as that's probably where we want to end up in a few years time. For the front end I'd go with HTML and vanilla JS. Front end dev has gotten so mad that picking any framework at this point could turn out to be a bad decision.

I agree 100%, but I'm curious how you feel about the state of Phoenix/Elixir when it comes to popularity. I'm perhaps too inexperienced/young to know how these things tend to shake out. That said, my impression is that it has enough of a foothold, and with Erlang enough of a solid base, that I wouldn't end up in a situation, say, 10 years from now where the whole ecosystem is a ghost town and I need to move to some o…

I'm old enough to wait until a technology has somewhat proven itself before jumping on it for client work, personal / internal projects are the perfect place to try this sort of thing out though and get a feel for whether you think it can succeed. I've had a pretty minimal play with Phoenix and I liked what I saw in terms of developer productivity and application performance, things looked a bit less certain when it came to CI and deployment though. This was a while back mind, and these areas may have improved a lot since then.

Re: Ask HN: What tech stack would you choose for a serious, long-term business app

#80
No hype, just use simple, proven technologies. No MongoDB, no React, ideally no SPA at all, just plain HTML and tiny bits of Javascript when/if needed.

My personal pick would be a Django app with Postgres as the DB, Django REST framework for the API endpoints (if needed), Redis for caching, and that's pretty much it. Platform is irrelevant as it might change in the long term, so I'll pick whatever is easiest/cheapest at the time and be done with it; the platform can always be swapped out later if needed.

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