Curious to hear what those starting new projects/startups are choosing for web application tooling and frameworks. This is meant to be an informal survey of the HN community for their web development preferences.
On the front end side of things, I feel that React is not the default framework as Svelte and HTMX are everywhere (or maybe I am reading too much Twitter). On the backend side, I think it is a bit more open and has to vary from project to project based on specific needs but would love to hear what you are using and why anyway.
For many, I realize the answer may be to use the tools you are most comfortable with but wanted to ask just to see.
In my bubble, Angular and React are the primary frontend frameworks, with Vue sometimes being ahead and sometimes behind either. Virtually no one uses Svelte in my circles., but most folks have heard of it or have applied it in their side projects. HTMX is even more niche, still up for discovery for most folks, don’t know it well enough to comment. I prefer Vue and Angular DX but I favor React component libraries, it’s complicated. My absolute favorite is PureScript with React.
In most cases, backend is Spring on Java for well-defined or rather systematically approached applications, and Python or TypeScript for something that can run on AWS Lambdas and a junior dev might become responsible for. I think .NET is a no less decent choice for that matter. Go for rather small applications that need to touch on layers beneath the application layer, not the best choice to express complex business logic. I personally just pick the JVM stack with Kotlin and Spring, and deploy to AWS.
Rust is too unstable for long-term maintenance but deserves to be respected, I try to push Rust (though I’ve spent most of my time in C++) for smoother collaboration and simpler code review—there’s little I ever need to check after the Rust compiler—mostly the business logic and some axioms, in addition this raises the bar for quality contributions. Having to deal with low-key merges after the fact, sometimes even circumventing CI, is not pleasant at all.
Therefore, having the source of QA truth in the compiler is a boon to my productivity, hope it manages to obviate even more test suites, lifting more of the business logic into the type system, the way you can do it in Haskell or, even more powerful, Idris, but that’s a bit off-topic. Yet that’s what I choose if I need correctness.