Ask HN: What is your preferred “full-stack in a box” solution and why?

What I mean by a "full-stack in a box" is a web client solution + server solution + DB solition that all work well together for a small to medium size business. Minimizing integration friction and maximising productivity. Is it Typescript/C#/Postgress? Elm/Haskell/MySQL? Clojurescript/Clojure/Datomic? Ruby on Rails/? Or something else entirely?

I think it depends a lot on the product you are building, but in my option nothing beats Django for rapid development of a website/app. True it doesn't have an answer "in the box" for client side interaction but combined with tools such as htmx and alpine.js you get something very similar to the modern Rails/Hotwire stack. Personally though you can get along way with just vanilla JavaScript.

I think the killer feature of Django is the Admin framework, its so often overlooked when developing a site/app that internal (not user facing) tools are so important. With the Dango Admin you get something incredible with so few lines of code. It's practically a super power.

If you need a little more interactive "SPA" like functionality, throw in Django REST Framework and your preference of front end framework. I would tend to go with Vue as it feels like it's the same sort of "battery's included" framework as Django. You can also easily use it to build smaller components without having to go all in on SPA.

If you are then asked for a Mobile App on top of that I would reach for Ionic/Capacitor, particularly if you already have a (partly) Vue or React based front end. You can then reuse most of your code. Need some native functionality not covered by Capacitor plugins? take a look at brining in NativeScript, it works brilliantly with Capacitor. (If you haven't taken a look at modern Ionic/Capacitor it has come on so far since the Cordova/PhoneGap days)

I liked sveltekit, orbitjs and jsonapi.net + entity framework + postgres pretty much. Once upon a time there was EmberJS :-)

For prototyping I liked postgrest or api-platform.

https://typeorm.io/ is also nice...

Gonna throw a hat in for Deno. It’s not super mature, but you can certainly write isomorphic React + some MVC code in a monolith - nothing to sneeze at, looks promising.

I think tooling to generate typesafe SQL methods from inspecting a DB is a big win for the Deno ecosystem. And an equivalent for Storybook. From that point forwards, it’s pretty good for lean projects.

I’m a huge Elixir nerd and after some annoyances with JS stacks I decided to try going with Phoenix and LiveView for my pet project.