alt Hacker NewsShow of hands for backend web services development -
Who uses Django, Rails, or similar full-featured frameworks?
Who uses micro-frameworks like Flask?
Who uses enterprise Java, Jetty, Dot Net, etc.?
Who uses an entirely Javascript stack?
Who uses a non-traditional language that has become more web-servicey, like Go, Rust, or Swift?
Who uses something so wildly untraditional that it's barely mentioned? OkCupid using C++, etc.?
Who uses an entirely custom framework (in any language)?
Would really love to see a break down of who is using what, how people feel about their tech stack, etc.?
Replies
Flask is my go-to, but I've had great fun with Rust recently.
Django is the best thing in the world for writing Django apps. (No, I'm not trying to be funny there. If what you're doing looks like something Django would solve, it's fantastic.) But most of the things I do aren't Django apps, and ones you get off its happy path, you can be in for a world of hurt. Oh, you use SQLAlchemy everywhere else, and you'd like to use it in your Django app so that you can have one set of models and re-use the service logic you've built? Hah, too bad! Or you need your REST API output to look a very specific way? Have fun with that! Your auth model doesn't look just like Django's? Hope your LLM is good at smoothing that over!
The good side is that it's an opinionated framework that does a lot of research on your behalf and makes some great choices. The bad side is that you better agree with its opinions or you're in for a bad time.
One proxy might be to look at the upvote counts for each of their respective latest release HN posts.
Eg, this post has ~50 (though only posted an hour ago)
Rails 8 had ~550
I"m almost entirely dotnet these days, with a smattering of Go here and there.
I work in ops though, so I'm not building consumer-facing products but mostly IT glue code and internal tooling (mostly Go), dashboards, business report generators, gluing SaaS together, etc. (mostly dotnet/C#).
I've done several custom frameworks for solo projects in Java & Go, all based on server generated content, inspired by Seaside but more RESTy.
Also used Flask and similar libraries for back ends.
Did one project in Rails, which was a pretty bad experience in comparison, and killed any motivation to look into Django.
Also did plenty of Spring in Java professionally, unfortunately.
In a company that uses a traditional web framework like Django to actually build the frontend and backend, not just as only for implementing the APIs, I would even consider doing parts of frontend work again, making everything responsive and so on. That's what I do for a not-yet-startup project.
As fully-featured as possible, because as much as I like building stuff, I don’t give a shit about coding stuff that has been figured out since the 90’s. Another question is whether semantics and operations get bloated or affect development speed in a framework but I don’t think it’s the case with the Django.
I started using Django before the official 1.0 release and used it almost exclusively for years on web projects.
Lately I prefer to mix my own tooling and a couple major packages in for backends (FastAPI, SQLAchemy) that are still heavily inspired by patterns I picked up while using Django. I end up with a little more boilerplate, but I also end up with a little more stylistic flexibility.
I still have some very old Django projects that I'm maintaining for > 15 years. It's an absolute delight.
In what sense is Go not a traditional language for web services? They're almost the only thing it's good at, and it's been doing them for 13 years.
Would love to see this.
Django just makes life 1000x easier. Can architect an app with data models, api, openapi, etc. within an hour.
At work, it is mainly Kotlin and Go webservices with some Rust for very specific use cases
- Have written Rails and Django both
- Have written SPAs (React/Svelte)
- Have written Go based services
Each has their on pros and cons.
Fable (just for the fun of it) and the new one dot net one file web services that resemble flask
This would make an interesting poll. I think that's possible here? Maybe with some karma threshold, I don't seem to be able to make one.
We use flask and go at work. I've been micro-framework or roll-my-own-framework most of my career. Go is new for me though, and it's grown on me enough that it's what I prefer for new web-facing projects even for little personal things.