Same, but with ASP.NET (which produces an OpenAPI specification) + Entity Framework on the server, React + TypeScript on the client (which consume that specification through openapi-generator).
I chuckle every time I read claims about Go (or whatever) being amazingly productive. I don't think it's possible to beat this stack with regards to both productivity and ease of long-term support, at least without going to very niche technologies where you'll have other problems.
Database schema is generated from models described in C# (or reverse-engineered from an existing schema). You don't have to compromise your schema to satisfy the ORM (another claim I often read on HN), as it's very adaptable to your needs.
Migrations are generated automatically — change your models, ask it to generate migration code in C# + a SQL migration script, review the generated SQL, and apply.
The vast majority of database queries (pretty much everything besides reports) is written in type-safe LINQ, which makes it easy to refactor code, and also construct & combine queries at runtime. Unlike that specification abomination JPA expects you to use, LINQ queries look something like this:
If you change your schema and forget to update one of the queries accordingly (although using an IDE makes this pretty much impossible), your code won't even compile.
I agree with the sentiment--and with most of your comment--except the assertion that "I don't think it's possible to beat this stack".
I have something similar: Kotlin on the server-side with my SQL DSL generated by jOOQ and Flyway running my schema migrations. I don't have any experience with LINQ--but it looks to be of a similar idea to jOOQ such that you get an autogenerated, injection-safe, type-safe, compile-time-checked SQL DSL.
If you like LINQ, you'd probably really like jOOQ. It's uber-powerful and the only queries that I've not been able to completely write in jOOQ are geo-spatial queries--and even for them, I can use string SQL for just the one where-clause predicate where I need to go off-the-rails--the rest of the query still being standard jOOQ. The thing I like most about it, is that the queries that I write in the DSL are sooo close-to-the-metal of pure SQL--I'm not even context-switching between SQL and jOOQ really. Check it out!
Also have to sing praise for Kotlin, flyway, and some type-safe db framework.
I’ve recently been migrating projects from jOOQ to SQLDelight. While not as feature complete, being able to write queries in sql and then generate type safe code has been amazing. My biggest issue with jOOQ has been joins where you lose some null safety and general issues with the generated POJO (which admittedly has improved over time). With SQLDelight, it has felt like the database just fades away when writing Kotlin.
I think parent meant “stack” for every similarly high level, statically typed language. I can vouch for Spring (Data) with JPA. The criteria api is also very great.
> Database schema is generated from models described in C# (or reverse-engineered from an existing schema). You don't have to compromise your schema to satisfy the ORM (another claim I often read on HN), as it's very adaptable to your needs.
Generating the schema from the models is easy mode, the ORM naturally won't generate anything it doesn't understand. The claim is that the ORM can't handle advanced schema features that it wouldn't generate. (Although in my experience most people claiming that just never bothered to learn the ORM).
This is very backend-centric. It can't compare to a framework like SvelteKit or NEXT or NUXT, where the primary benefit is also shipping your tightly-integrated frontend code to the browser. .NET apps are old school, full refresh apps unless you are also using a separate frontend framework like React or Vue standalone. And that adds a lot of time and overheard.
Everything you described in terms of easy migrations and querying is exactly what Prisma gives you in the stack the OP described.
Microsoft has invested massively in modernizing .NET and C#.
It is also widely praised by devs - .NET is ranked 4th most loved framework in the SO 2022 dev survey.
You have built-in scaffolding to get a React + .NET app right from the CLI, with hot-reload and all the facilities you'd expect.
Hardly old school at all. Personally, if I had to build a website with a thin API layer I'd reach for NextJS (or equivalent) alone, but anything beyond that I'd go for .NET Core any time of day.
With ASP.NET, a React/Angular project is separate, there's a separate model layer, and you have to keep that in sync with the .NET models.
With Next, there's true code reuse between client and server. Next is smart about shipping your code where it needs to run, server, client, both. You can even mix and match from page to page: Server-side render one page per request; statically generate another at build time.
As much as I like ASP.NET, Next has leapfrogged it for web apps.
> As much as I like ASP.NET, Next has leapfrogged it for web apps.
Look, I like NextJS as much as the next guy - I'd say it's my main working technology right now. And I've never built anything on .Net - I know its characteristics from watching tutorials and reading docs.
My take however is that "web apps" is a very broad world. NextJS gives you a thin API layer. There is no model layer to speak of. You're left fending for yourself in the wild, wild world of JavaScript.
.Net Core, on the other hand, offers a batteries-included, heavy-lifting, opinionated framework, with an immense toolbox and many conventions to guide you. There has to be a reason why people speak such wonders of it. If I had to build something enterprise-y with more than handful of devs it would probably be my choice.
The grass isn't greener. I've built in both - I have a .NET Core/Angular SaaS app that I created and sell, and I've been building greenfield in Next. I much prefer Next.
The duplication in .NET/Angular has never been worth it...not once. And having network calls for everything is unnecessarily painful.
I started the app in 2019, when RESTful SPAs were all the rage. I bought into the hype that you should have API endpoints for everything no matter what, because you'd soon have a mobile app and daemons and this and that.
Turns out, YAGNI. It would've been better to server-side render and only create API endpoints when necessary.
That's what I like about Next: Static generate where you can, server-side render per request where you can't, SPA where necessary - and the layers are as flat as can be. It's the best of all worlds.
That being said, I've worked in .NET for ~16 years now, and I like it more than JavaScript/TypeScript. But I'd still rather develop a web app in Next and put any background services elsewhere in .NET if needed.
> But I'd still rather develop a web app in Next and put any background services elsewhere in .NET if needed.
Thanks for sharing your perspective.
I think we're essentially saying the same thing. I would start pretty much 99% of my projects in NextJS. But if I needed to reach for something doing complex logic and scaling to a larger team, I could always add a .Net service to that later.
If anything the model layer in Next.js is superior because you can use the same model layer to build the page SSR, and then Next.js will gracefully transfer the entire model layer over to the client where your app can continue to work against it.
That sounds nice for the main user interaction, but what about when you need more heavy lifting of async tasks and side effects?
Like I get a shared model being accessed "directly" for the things that the UI displays and manipulates. But once you click an Order button you have transactions to process, ledgers to update, notifications to dispatch.
That kind of code doesn't float between client and server, it needs to happen once the order has been received regardless of the client state.
You can offload that to other services, lambdas, etc. but that's the sort of thing that you can just do all-inclusive in a standalone backend be it Node, .NET, Go, etc.
> With ASP.NET, a React/Angular project is separate, there's a separate model layer, and you have to keep that in sync with the .NET models.
The separation of models is indeed inevitable when there is JS on the client and not-JS on the server. That's a 'problem' common to all non-JS back-ends.
However there are three points I'd make.
1. That's often a good thing, not a flaw, in that it enforces a mapping boundary between what the server and the client know and therefore strongly discourages leakage of data.
2. Mapping requirements of this type are much too trivial to base a tech stack choice on. It's barely worth considering given that mappings only need doing once and updating once per change. They are also very good protection against accidentally exposing new stuff precisely because changes in models don't automatically impact the client.
3. If this model syncing was really an issue (it usually isn't) you could try Blazor. By doing C# on the client as well as the server you get to share the same code/models. As per point 2 I don't think that's a good enough reason to switch tech stacks, but Blazor also has its place.
> 1. That's often a good thing, not a flaw, in that it enforces a mapping boundary
That just sounds like mandatory busywork that may or may not prevent poor programming practices. I'd rather pick a framework for productivity.
> 2. Mapping requirements of this type are much too trivial to base a tech stack choice on.
Trivial for large corporations with money to burn, maybe. A huge time-waster for my startup.
> 3. If this model syncing was really an issue (it usually isn't) you could try Blazor.
Blazor is cool, but the bundle sizes are still too large right now, and it doesn't have the ecosystem of web components that JavaScript does. Sure, you can integrate, but you're just making life more complicated for yourself. It feels like too little, too late.
> That just sounds like mandatory busywork that may or may not prevent poor programming practices. I'd rather pick a framework for productivity.
Mandatory busywork implies stuff with no real purpose. I specifically pointed out the purpose. You may not agree with the cost/benefit involved in doing it, but that's a preference and doesn't automatically make someone else's way of working busywork. And personally I find it increases productivity by eliminating a whole range of security concerns.
> Trivial for large corporations with money to burn, maybe. A huge time-waster for my startup.
This largely depends upon if you accept that the work itself is of benefit. If you believe it's just busywork, then whilst my own opinion differs, your conclusion is reasonable for your situation.
> Blazor is cool, but the bundle sizes are still too large right now, and it doesn't have the ecosystem of web components that JavaScript does.
You're right on the sizes and the ecosystem (though that is not Blazor-specific and is something no non-JS client-side tech will ever be able to compete with).
I do ASP.NET and Blazor (alongside Node, Go, Python, Rails etc) and TBH whilst personally I see great value in Blazor it feels like that's mostly for back-office or enterprise applications where you get the incredible productivity (that much is true) and don't need to worry about the sizes or, depending on how you implement it as this is optional, the need for a persistent web-socket connection.
I know there's been a lot of discussion about whether .NET/C# are faster than X or Y or Z based on TechEmpower benchmarks, but this will give you a backend that looks more or less like Express with an OpenAPI schema built-in (generate TS bindings for frontend) and a runtime that is going to be higher thoughput than Express or Node.
That's not what GP is talking about, though. I like the new .NET minimal APIs, but what GP is talking about is the frontend/backend _integration_ with a framework like Next.js.
Next isn't really like Angular in that you don't need an API layer (though you can have one if needed). It's more like ASP.NET Core MVC.
The difference is the frontend code is truly integrated with the backend. It all lives in the same project. It's just React components. You can render them statically on the server at build time, per request at runtime, or on the client. And you can mix and match. Next only ships the client the JavaScript it needs.
You don't need an API unless you want SPA parts of the app. Where you do want that, it's simple to implement, because you're already in JavaScript and all your other code plays nicely with it. It's a really nice way to organize and consolidate the different pieces of web dev IMO.
* The payload of WASM makes it a difficult choice if serving mobile or regions with poor internet and you want a good first impression.
* Server side needing a constant socket for everything presents it's own limitations.
* It has hot reloading, but it pales in comparison to the JS experience at best and in my own experience has a lot of edge cases leading to full rebuilds.
* C# tooling is fantastic; Razor however I've found to be slow and well behind the experience of popular JS libraries.
* When you do need JS interop (e.g. browser API's) the experience is, IMO, awful.
I feel Blazor's niche is internal, simple LOB apps and I can understand the appeal if you don't already know JS or have some serious regulatory requirements around vendors and need to avoid NPM.
Personally, I find the DX and quality of the end product in svelte kit trump the code sharing of Blazor.
Last time I looked at Blazor it only had two options, which were both equally horrible for public websites.
You either had to ship a big and bloated WASM file, which was at least 10x the size of competing JS frameworks, and in some cases 100X the size. Or you had to render all dynamic parts of your website on the server, which made latency a huge problem, since your website feels sluggish between each interaction.
I don't know when it was the last time you took a look at Blazor, but Blazer server is extremely fast. I built some big corporate apps with it and never had any latency problems.
Were they internal or external apps? Because latency was the problem last time I looked, and it won't be super noticeable if you have the servers that close to you.
For local development do you run two servers, next and asp and then for dynamic api calls by the client do you proxy the request through next or go directly to the asp server by its port number?
Similarly in production do you use a reverse proxy for the asp server so that requests to like /api go to the asp server?
> I chuckle every time I read claims about Go (or whatever) being amazingly productive. I don't think it's possible to beat this stack with regards to both productivity and ease of long-term support
It's easy to beat Open API, it adds friction, generates ugly code and has a suboptimal UI. If you use https://servicestack.net you don't to rely on an intermediary external tool, you can generate clean TypeScript DTOs directly from strong C# typed models, that only needs to generate the clean DTOs for your typed APIs (i.e. without the ugly client proxy) as all generated DTOs can be used with the smart generic Service Client, which works the same way across 9 popular languages [2], maximizing reusability and reducing any porting efforts if needing to support Mobile Apps in future. It works even better in .NET languages where if you properly design your Service Layer [3] into a impl-free project you can avoid code-gen entirely and share the DTOs that define your typed Service Contract with .NET clients enabling an end-to-end Typed API without code-gen, which dramatically improves Dev UX in C# clients like Blazor [4] since you can add/modify APIs whilst your Service is running.
We also maintain a better integrated and UX Friendly API Explorer [5] that Open API's Swagger UI which generates richer, validation bound customizable Forms directly from your Typed DTOs, better discovery and API docs and a "Code" tab which gives API consumers step-by-step instructions for how to easily call your Typed APIs in their preferred programming language [6].
As for productivity I'd say it's hard to beat the productivity of AutoQuery [7] where you only need to define your API's typed POCO contract, which ServiceStack uses to implement fully queryable APIs, that you can access immediately from an instant build-in UI https://locode.dev or rapidly create custom Blazor pages with Auto Form and AutoQueryGrid components [8].
Look, mate, I do unironically appreciate a good enterforaprize sales pitch, but this is a nerd space so corporate marketing wank is in fact actively counterproductive for the purpose of evangelising what's actually pretty neat tech.
To everybody else reading this - mythz' tone deaf bullshit wasn't my favourite way to be reminded I have a gag reflex but the URLs are well worth a look.
https://github.com/OpenAPITools/openapi-generator
I chuckle every time I read claims about Go (or whatever) being amazingly productive. I don't think it's possible to beat this stack with regards to both productivity and ease of long-term support, at least without going to very niche technologies where you'll have other problems.
Database schema is generated from models described in C# (or reverse-engineered from an existing schema). You don't have to compromise your schema to satisfy the ORM (another claim I often read on HN), as it's very adaptable to your needs.
Migrations are generated automatically — change your models, ask it to generate migration code in C# + a SQL migration script, review the generated SQL, and apply.
The vast majority of database queries (pretty much everything besides reports) is written in type-safe LINQ, which makes it easy to refactor code, and also construct & combine queries at runtime. Unlike that specification abomination JPA expects you to use, LINQ queries look something like this:
If you change your schema and forget to update one of the queries accordingly (although using an IDE makes this pretty much impossible), your code won't even compile.