Ask HN: What is a “boring” web stack?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12866695

by stevetodd • 10 years ago

51 48 10 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

There have been threads recently lamenting how many in the web community often chase new and shiny. Many advocate choosing "boring," tried-and-true technologies for the web. What are the "boring" stacks that you see successfully used for the web? If you were starting a new web project today, what would your "boring" stack look like?

detaro2• 10 years ago

Ruby on Rails or Django for the backend, some basic JS (JQuery and other libraries of similar complexity) for the front-end. Choice of JS tools mostly depends on how much front-end features you need.

ThrustVectoring2• 10 years ago

The persistence layer is also a thing, and the boring choice is something like Postgres or MySQL.

StavrosK3• 10 years ago

At least at the persistence layer, there's a clear default: Postgres will do everything you want, and it'll be hard to outgrow.

ronilan• 10 years ago

I think "boring" is another word for "not frustrating".

I recently did a project where I wrote the same API in Ruby/Sinatra, Node/Express and PHP/Slim; Connected it to S3, GCloud and Azure for assets and MongoDb for data; and then deployed each permutation to Heroku, Azure, App Engine and EB.

For "under the api barrier", Heroku was the only one that ran everything smoothly; S3 is the easiest to interact with, and as I worked through the project, I switched from Ruby to Node as the prefered platform.

For "over the api barrier", where users actually use the project, it depends on the project requirements. In this case no dependancies was a hard requirement, hence Vanilla JS. But if you have a lot of UI, you'd need a lib for both JS and CSS and it depends on teammates pref, organization pref and legacy.

My 2 cents.

gravypod• 10 years ago

PHP with some template library. Pretty much gets the jobs done and stays out of your way. RainTPL[0] is the best template engine I've ever used since it is just so simple to understand what's going on.

[0] https://github.com/feulf/raintpl

johan_larson2• 10 years ago

Angular/Bootstrap on the front end. Java with Spring Boot on the server. MySQL for storage. Deploy on AWS.

Nobody's idea of excitement.

bjconlan• 10 years ago

Haha, but there is always a way to make this less vanilla than people would expect. Ie adding Spring 5 (alpha) reactive web layer & I still love hateoas (spring/data-rest) but adds a little too much extra complexity for the benefit (on the client).

I miss well tested and 'best practice' pattern derived systems...

quantumhobbit• 10 years ago

Well Java is boring...

Actually language doesn't matter so much as choice of frameworks. Basically choose what you know works and avoid hype.

Also minimalism is a better indicator than age. A brand new simple framework is better than something old but over engineered.

jordanlev• 10 years ago

Ye old "LAMP" stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) is pretty boring, and widely used. Very stable, very performant (and lots of options for caching / indexing / tweaking code when you encounter bottlenecks). Lots of competition in the hosting space as well, and you're not locked into any one company's flavor of "cloud computing platform".

warlox2• 10 years ago

But then you have to use PHP.

soulchild37• 10 years ago

You upload PHP file to your server, done. No deploy task and stuff.

Raed667• 10 years ago

I second LAMP (although you can consider changing Apache for Nginx).

For PHP it depends on what you want to do, but Laravel (or Lumen) may help you A LOT!

It is super boring by these standard:

- You can find setup tutorials everywhere

- Almost every question you might think of has been already answered

- It will do what it says it will do

(Also don't forget to install phpMyAdmin, because who wants to write SQL in a terminal)

foobarchu2• 10 years ago

In the enterprise world, a boring stack is usually Java 7, 8 if you're adventurous, with Spring as the backing framework, running on a Tomcat server, talking to a SQL database (Mysql, Postgres, Oracle) through a Hibernate layer.

None of these are really great technologies, but they work, have infinite documentation, and it's easy to find people who know them.

eecks• 10 years ago

Can you name any "great" technologies in place of each of these?

foobarchu2• 10 years ago

That's in the eye of the beholder, and definitely depends on the situation. The good thing about the boring tools is that they have really wide applicability.

For a small REST api, I really like Dropwizard on top of something with a solid raw driver, like Redis or Cassandra. If you want to go relational, I like the MyBatis model of persistence over the Hibernate style ORM, it gives you so much more flexibility and power over modeling, while still giving you an easy out for swapping out datasources.

I don't really know of a good drop-in replacement for what Spring does, unfortunately, because Spring is really a conglomeration of so much different stuff. My big issue with it isn't so much what it does, as the fact that it encourages really bad mindsets in developers who start their career with it. I can't count the number of times I've asked someone to describe what annotations are, and the only answer they can give is about Spring (the worst part is when they attribute things from Jersey or JPA to Spring), or how they reduce the need for XML configuration (in Spring, yeah, that is true).

cableshaft• 10 years ago

ASP.NET MVC5 C# + Angular 1, because that's what we do at work and what I'm currently most familiar with. It's a pretty solid way to go if you don't mind Microsoft technologies, either. Although ASP.NET Core is probably more future-proof.

kirse• 10 years ago

+1... ASP.NET / ReactJS.NET has been great for me. I've done so many small->med projects on ASP.NET MVC / EF / SQL with some F# mixed in for fun and it just works. Toss in ELMAH for easy error logging.

Testing + deploying to either Azure/IIS is also one-click simple and very easy to teach Jr. Devs to step into a solution and become productive with very little guidance.

juliangoldsmith• 10 years ago

I'd call a stack using Golang, Postgres, jQuery, and SASS/Less boring. It doesn't do much of anything magical, and as a result you can reason about every part of what you're writing.

StavrosK3• 10 years ago

Java, the Microsoft stack, Django, RoR, anything that's been around for more than five years. I don't include PHP there because I don't think the language is predictable/consistent enough, same as JS.

cphoover• 10 years ago

Is picking a a "boring" for the sake of "boring" stack really all that sensible? How about we choose things because of tangible reasons, like test coverage, infrastructural/operational simplicity, availability of development resources, industry/enterprise adoption. IMHO these are the things that make sense when choosing a framework/language. Choosing something just because it's old and boring is illogical.

MichaelBurge• 10 years ago

"boring" means "of low technical risk" in this context.

totony• 10 years ago

I did most of my website dev with PHP, js, css and html, no framework (except jquery at one point). Boring but did the job well

1_800_UNICORN• 10 years ago

Java, Ruby, PHP - all safe bets for server-side language. They're all easy to find developers for, stable, and easily supported by all major IaaSes (AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Azure) and PaaSes (Cloud Foundry, Heroku, Kubernetes, Docker).

Javascript - either no Javascript, or very simple vanilla Javascript. No transpiling, no Typescript, no JSX, no ES2015.

CSS - Regular ol' CSS. Set a limit on number of lines of CSS you're willing to introduce per controller action and try and keep your project honest to that number. Avoid frameworks if possible, pick a simple framework for grid layout if you really need it.

andrewmcwatters• 10 years ago

I know this doesn't truly really answer what you're asking, but: GitHub Pages, static HTML, no or plain JavaScript, plain CSS, no frameworks.

You can do a lot with just that. Here's an example of what I've done with just that:

http://www.planimeter.org/grid-sdk/

http://www.andrewmcwatters.com

shitgoose• 10 years ago

the word stack itself is quite boring.

anon1253• 10 years ago

Server side rendered HTML, simple forms with POST redirects. Little to no CSS or Javascript. Pick your back-end of choice: Java Spring, Python Django, Common Lisp (wink wink). Use a well known SQL server for persistence. Might be boring, but there are still a lot of cases where this is actually desirable, and it's insanely performant.

warlox2• 10 years ago

At this point, isn't a site without CSS only suitable for tenured academics who don't care about their personal websites?

johan_larson2• 10 years ago

Have you seen this? No CSS, but it looks OK.

http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/

Using absolutely no CSS at all probably isn't what you want, unless you have a fetish for serif fonts. But a little can go a long way.

stuaxo• 10 years ago

Plain Django with Postgres.

Django templating and bootstrap to make things look OK.

lastofus• 10 years ago

Pick anything that's still heavily used today, that has been around for 10+ years, and it's hard to go wrong.

The only caveat to this is on the front-end JS side of things. jQuery is still solid, but the language and ecosystem has been so not great over the last decade that something a bit newer might be worth looking at (maybe look at 3-5 year old libs/frameworks instead).

psranga• 10 years ago

bottle.py + Postgres + Nginx on Ubuntu on a VPS is my go-to boring stack.

I recommend just using SQLite for the MVP. Launch then iterate.

ohgh1ieD• 10 years ago

My boring stack is: Spring, Hibernate, Postgresql, but sometimes when nobody watches and I feel really nasty, I use the Play framework.

Ask HN: What is a “boring” web stack?

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