In Hacker News alentred asked seeking advice for which technology stack to use for a web app MVP in 2023 “use boring technology – iterate fast – deploy with minimal cost for now”. He added “So, to your taste, what compares in 2023 to the romanticized experience of PHP in 2000s? Or should I just “undust” my PHP and learn Laravel?”
Discussions mentioned having used Spring, Rails, Express, Django, Flask, and Elixir, but they found these frameworks too complex and expensive for their MVP’s needs. They also mentioned having used serverless frameworks like Zappa but found it immature. The original poster has vague memories of using PHP in the past and wants to know if there is a modern technology that compares to PHP’s simplicity and ease of deployment.
One developer suggested using Gunicorn, which is similar in setup to PHP and has a similar number of lines in the Nginx config file. PHP has the added advantage of allowing for shared hosting, which is a good option for beginners.
Another developer recommended using ASP on .net, which is mature and quick. But they also advised that if someone already knows PHP, then they should just use PHP, and Laravel is a great framework for it. Some developers prefer .Net or Java, as they provide stability and do not require frequent changes with the ever-changing ecosystem.
A developer warned that choosing the cheapest option may not always be the best decision, and suggested considering whatever technology you know best and whatever has the most batteries included. Other recommendations included Quarkus with Kotlin, Servlets without Spring, Ruby on Rails, and Go with Pocketbase.
Overall, there seems to be a consensus that sticking with what you know best is often the best option for quick iteration, and using a language with a large number of batteries included can help speed up development. However, some users caution that simplicity and cheapness may come at the expense of scalability and maintainability, and that it is important to choose a stack that can grow with the app if it becomes successful.
What do you think ?
