Ask HN: Choosing a framework for the next big thing | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Choosing a framework for the next big thing

2 pointsycomverdantnest4 comments

Let's pretend you're working at a startup to build the next Airbnb. Your team is very small, it's just you and maybe 1-2 other developers. You need to build an application with the following requirements/assumptions:

  - User facing "CRUD"
    - 10+ domain models (eg. House, Guest, Cart, Booking, etc)
    - Lots of forms w/ custom validation
    - Pagination so you can display 1k+ records in tables/infinite-scroll
    - Some areas of rich interactivity (eg. Host availability calendar) but mostly presentational UI / forms
  - Admin panel
  - Background jobs / tasks
    - Scheduled - Run specific job at point in future (eg. Remind user in 3 months about upcoming trip)
    - Recurring - Run cron jobs for repetitive tasks (eg. Run daily report at midnight)
  - Emails / Notifications
    - 10+ custom email templates (booking confirmation, upcoming trip reminder, etc.)
    - Usually sent via background job
  - File uploads / storage (eg. Users upload pictures of house)
  - Auth
    - Users login to book
    - Hosts login to manage their home listings
  - Testing
    - Primarily integration / e2e tests of core flows

You need to choose a framework:

  - Laravel (v9)
  - Rails (v7)
  - Django (v4)
  - Phoenix (v1.6)

Which framework do you choose?

Assume your team knows each framework equally well. Which one allows you to start quickly and still be maintainable 2-3 years down the road while continually adding new features?

Django, Django is "Web Frameowkr For Perfectionist With Deadline". Django has builtin Admin Panel so you don't have to create again. Django have good builtin authentication and security.

Ok I feel like I can give some good advice here. I wrote 4 Django apps over the last few years some for work and some during vacation/downtime (and sold a couple). One was a car reservation system with reminder emails. The others were covid screening, warehouse management and a car key replacement service.

They all were multi-tenant and had the concept of an admin login and a user login. Basically I had organizations and each org can have admins and users. Each user had a profile with a role/organization_id which determined what UI they were served.

I used Django apps this way:

  * core-app - models and common services
  * admin-app - admin ui and admin services
  * user-app - user ui and user services

Of course you could code up the admin and user projects separately for maximum decoupling but you'd want your common core app to be a dependency for each.

Messages (Email and SMS) to be sent were dropped on a queue and processed by workers. Each message was self contained and basically was the type of email to send, a map of data and a pointer to the template. I think in the later version I skipped the worker and called a lambda on the message appearing (this was AWS)

Reminders in the future were just put in the db and then a cron job grabbed them when it was time to send. For instance, the time to remind someone that their car reservation was about to expire was configurable by the admin - so you could say 24 hrs before or less depending on the dealer's policy. Anyway you get the picture.

UI was all simple with a bootstrap based admin template that was mobile friendly and mostly web 1.0. I did add some fanciness with intercooler or later htmx. I also used a js grid extensively for reports.

I can't share the code with you (sold it or was for employer) but I can certainly share some poc code on other projects as well as the general approach. My email is in my profile and I am happy to talk you through it and login and show you the some of the systems that I still do enhancements for.

The main point is Django was rock solid and super productive. Deploying was the only hassle and since I know AWS pretty well that's what I went with.

I do know there are products that you can purchase that have a lot of stuff already setup. I haven't used them but this one seems to come up a lot - https://www.saaspegasus.com/

Well since I know PHP I would go with Laravel. Build on strength.

Laravel

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