
Ask HN: Pragmatic choice of server-side web framework - dotNEET
Questions on web frameworks come up often, but I feel mine has slightly more context that I hope others will have more experience in.<p>I want to build a few SaaS projects on the side to see if they take off.<p>I want to keep my technology choice pragmatic in order to get something made fast with the desired functionality without creating too many bugs on the way. I&#x27;m open to different technology choices (and can pick up any similar backend framework quickly), but there are a couple things that I think are most important:<p>* Pragmatic: I don&#x27;t need a SSR PWA SPA with all the newest bells and whistles. I&#x27;d ideally like to keep the complexity low. Regular pages with forms and postbacks seem to be the way to go here, with javascript sprinkled in where needed (maybe something like turbolinks if the UX is hindering the product, but I&#x27;d like to avoid paying the SPA tax if possible). dotnet core MVC, Rails, and Django seem like the most appropriate options here<p>* Active: I&#x27;d rather not use something abandoned where either bugs in the framework or surrounding libraries will not be fixed.<p>I don&#x27;t have a language preference. My framework familiarity in decreasing order is aspnet MVC, Rails, express&#x2F;sails. Most of these topics say use whatever framework for whichever language&#x2F;environment you know best, but I could get equally up to snuff in a week or two of evenings with any of these.<p>I also don&#x27;t mind using something that is non-traditional if it is the better choice. I&#x27;ve contributed to running Servant, Compojure, React, and Angular projects at various places I&#x27;ve worked.<p>I&#x27;m leaning towards dotnet core MVC or Rails.
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daleholborow
I'm mostly a c# guy these days so obviously biased, but I'm very pro
Servicestack for backend (in .net core) and am currently investigating the
syncfusion UI widgets which are free for small projects/businesses and come in
many flavours (react, angular, Aurelia, typescript, MVC, etc). I intensely
dislike front end when I can avoid it so my own choices are "as simple as
possible".

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arkokoley
I think Rails would be an excellent choice here. Lots of Gems and community
and enterprise support. A lot of bigwigs use Rails for their production
services.

Admin panel, tagging, search, you have gems for practically any functionality
you might need.

If you want to do some hardcore PWA and SPA stuff, you have webpack built in
rails through the webpacker utility. Go crazy!

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dotNEET
Thanks for the advice. I had built out a small application in dotnet core mvc
and rails to get a taste of how both of them are currently structured.

Rails OOP and dynamism allows for some less verbose abstractions which I like
(I'm not afraid of the magic, the rails source seems pretty legible), but
dotnet MVC has some nice things like async built in, and feature-full job
queueing without paying $1k per year.

Those are my initial impressions. I'd be glad to update my knowledge if I'm
wrong.

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arkokoley
I haven't had any experience with dot net MVC, but a feature full job queuing
is present in Rails through the ActiveJob module. If that falls short, you can
always use Sidekiq. We regularly use Sidekiq for all of our Async tasks at
Zense.

