Not for your current job. But if you were starting a new passion project.
Ask HN: If you were to build a web app today what tech stack would you choose?
1–10 of 214 posts
Re: Ask HN: If you were to build a web app today what tech stack would you choose?
#2My current side project is using python aiohttp and htmx. The main plus of Python is that it has a lot of machine learning functionality but the truth is almost all of that is used in batch jobs and if I did anything computationally intensive serving a page I would have to farm the work out to another process. I have no trouble maintaining Python I write but it seems to always fall apart like Jenna blocks when I hand it off to somebody else.
If I had to get more people involved and have it scale I might go to Flask but might also go to a Java-based backend as it really has the best ability to use threads and parallelism.
As for HTMX I like it but I think there could be something similar but a little more feature risk, for instance my app has a lot of tables and tools that make it easy to add client-side sort buttons would be nice. If I had more people working on it I could see using a react-a-like system as well.
The database is arangodb which I love for rapid prototyping but if it had to be really reliable the first thing I would look at is postgres.
Re: Ask HN: If you were to build a web app today what tech stack would you choose?
#3[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: If you were to build a web app today what tech stack would you choose?
#4Rails. It's all about developer comfort. ruby as a language is a delight to work with. Rails as a framework has all the features I need and then some more. Postgres as the database of course!
Re: Ask HN: If you were to build a web app today what tech stack would you choose?
#5This depends on your goal: Are you trying to build + finish a project, or learn a new skill? I like to separate these goals, or otherwise try to scope projects very narrowly.
For the former, I tend to reach for the tech stack that I've spent years working in and can very quickly spin up projects in. This is heavily specific to your background, but for me:
- Frontend: React, vite, react-router, Chakra UI.
- Backend: Node.js + Express
- Database: PostgreSQL
- Scheduled jobs/ML/data processing: Python
- Deployment/Infrastructure: Docker, docker-compose, AWS EC2 or Lightsail, Digital Ocean droplets, Netlify, Render
For the latter, there are lots of potentially better options, whether that's server-side rendering, serverless functions, etc. (Next.js, fly.io, supabase, are a few examples) and again depends on your industry.
Re: Ask HN: If you were to build a web app today what tech stack would you choose?
#6Next.js, material-ui, trpc
Most of what you need to get something functional and not totally ugly, not a lot that you don’t.
Re: Ask HN: If you were to build a web app today what tech stack would you choose?
#7Next.js. I consider it the industry standard
Re: Ask HN: If you were to build a web app today what tech stack would you choose?
#8Rails 7.1 deploy with Kamal to a low cost place.
Re: Ask HN: If you were to build a web app today what tech stack would you choose?
#9It would depend whether the web app is a "dynamic website" or a "super interactive app that happens to run in a browser".
For a website, it'd be Go + HTML/CSS (sprinkling JS where needed). Here's why: (1) Code will "just build" years later (2) Deployment is stupidly easy -- just build to a single binary with all resources embedded (3) Everything about the stack is stable and easy to reason about. Though perhaps not exciting.
For a "web app", I feel there are no great options. The half life of the JS ecosystem is about 5 minutes, so whatever you start with will be out of fashion shortly after. React has had some staying power, though isn't without its flaws. I generally feel like most "web apps" could actually be websites though.
Re: Ask HN: If you were to build a web app today what tech stack would you choose?
#10i am using svelte and firebase