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deegles

What would be the boring technology to pick for starting a web + backend project today?

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Several boring but good things

Spring Boot (Java) is really simple and boring yet a lot of capabilities underneath

Also, ASP.NET (c#) - similar deal

Django or Flask (Python)

Backbone.js, jQuery, Bootstrap (JS front end)

Express (JS backend)

Sinatra (Ruby)

PHP 6

Maybe Angular or Ember or even basic React+Flux in the front end if you can contain your enthusiasm

For hosting, find a boring PaaS and avoid the container mud wrestling

For pity's sake use PostgreSQL or MySQL, MongoDB burns

Django or Flask (Python) Express (JS backend) Sinatra (Ruby)

What would you suggest out of these for quick prototyping and just side projects?

Postgres and Flask. Create it as a package, not an individual module. Front-end it with gunicorn and nginx. All monitored by supervisord.

https://realpython.com/blog/python/kickstarting-flask-on-ubu...

Flask is awesome, sure, but you will have to do a lot of mundane stuff with Psycopg2 (may all gods help you if you choose to dive into sqlalchemy!). OTOH, Rails ORM is awesomely simple and just works for 95% of the cases.

Bottle (Python). It's very minimalist and tries very hard to get out of your way, but it usually provides enough for prototyping and quick spur-of-the-moment things.

The latter is also when you might appreciate the fact that its markup language is really just embedded Python (PHP style) - you're trusted to not abuse the power, but you define what "abuse" is.

There is no PHP6. Went from 5.6 to 7.

Yeah I meant PHP 5.6 , my bad

For my first project ever on Java - I did an API on Spring Data Rest and connected to a db I designed on Oracle (requirement).

I was pleasantly surprised at how much functionality I got for free once setup. I probably spent as much time on setting up Oracle and xml/config stuff as dev but it was still super fast to get a solid API built.

I really like how you, tomca32, and nous all are suggesting multiple language/framework options. I think a lot of the way these technology choices go wrong because people want to pick the best option, rather than a good-enough option that matches local conditions. The former strikes me as a local, narrowly focused tech optimization; the latter, looking at the bigger economic picture of the project.

Probably PHP and plain JS, which is why I think that argument doesn't make sense. New web stuff is currently so much better than the old alternative that dealing with tumultuous stability is often worth it.

I think there's a middle road. What you're mentioning is pretty extreme. Rails/Django/Spring and Angular/Ember are all considered boring and very stable while not nearly as outdated as your example.

Is it? I used to happily make very complex sites using Apache Wicket on top of Java. It lets you make composable, extensible components (including inherited markup). It is type safe (the cools kids are finally rediscovering how important this is for maintainability with Flow & TypeScript). It supports replacing components using AJAX. Sure, it's not great for client-side SVG rendering or the various other cool things you can do with React and co, but hand on heart, I can't honestly say I find doing all this stuff in JavaScript to be "so much better". Quite the opposite for the majority of intranet-type sites, in fact.

Care to show me your math on that over a 10-year time scale?

I'd be curious even to see it for the technologies you mention. But as others point out, there are plenty of things newer than PHP that have become pretty boring.

python/ruby/java on backend. React/Ember/Angular on front end. The core libraries are relatively stable, it's mostly supporting libs that will burn you if you aren't careful.

Rails on the backend. Angular on the frontend. Both are big, stable frameworks with tons of support, plugins, thousands of tutorials / SO Q&As. Whatever problem you encounter with those, somebody already solved it.

This is the case with any mature framework. Rails and Angular just happen to be my favorites, but Django, or Spring and Ember can probably work just as well.

Angular 1 to Angular 2 anybody!?

If you are using Rails, Angular is rarely necessary from my experience. Even if you have a lot of SPA-type functionality, jQuery can handle it pretty well in the asset pipeline.

I agree with that. I felt that the question really asked what frontend boring framework would I choose, but you are right.

I try to avoid having to put up Angular or anything big on the frontend and just scrape by with jQuery. However, when the interactions are supposed to be "rich" and have a lot of animations, drag/dropping, complex forms that validate on the fly, etc etc...things can get really complex. Then you're back to the old dilemma: you are either going to introduce a full-fledged framework, or write one yourself. In those situations, I pick Angular.

- Angular 2 also looks fine, but that defeats the question which asked about "boring", stable frameworks

Rails and jQuery. Seriously. This is at the top of list of the most maintainable, well documented web app methods that exist.

java

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