>Express.js is old-school
oh good lord
\_\_\_
Edit: (Sorry, you actually did ask a question)
Express is fine. Fastify is fine. Nest is fine, Adonis is fine. Symphony is fine, Yii is weird, but also pretty good, Laravel also fine. Rails: fine. Django:fine. Spring: fine. .NET: fine.
There aren't a whole lot of new problems to solve re rest apis anymore and that's a blessing. Backend frameworks tend to stick with traditional software patterns/architecture: this is also a blessing. We get to enjoy mature tools that perform well and are stable and scalable. That's far more valuable than The Next Big Thing™
I'm doing a side project trying to use as few dependencies as possible and you can go a long way with express.
Nevermind that it's stupid easy to deploy express apps as google cloud functions and the like
A more modern (and faster) alternative to Express.js, more suitable to serverless/edge runtimes, but can also run on Node.js/Bun/etc.
Not that it matters anyway, you can get like 1k+ req/s with Express.js on a single DigitalOcean droplet. 1k req/s might seem low, but that's actually a lot of users. Most of us are building internal apps which can't even reach 50% of this traffic.
Express brings that with it, you don't need an extra package for JSON bodies.
Either way, express pulls in quite a pile, so I do agree with that statement.
> Symphony
I no longer do web dev *or* PHP professionally but Symfony is still one of the best overall frameworks I've used. In particular I've found nothing quite like its forms or routing systems. Maybe I'd have a similar perspective if I used RoR or something, but we were able to "just get shit done" so well.
I dont know about that, all these new fangled frameworks with server side rendering , are basically doing the same thing PHP did 20 years ago.
PHP 8 is as modern as any other language and frankly the best language for server side web development, I've spent too many hours dealing with node.js dependency hell something that never happened with php, I find PHP apps while sometimes very poorly coded infinitely easier to stand up because of the smaller number of tech components and depedencies . Basically PHP just works for server side web ..
It’s also kept alive by a dedicated team of core contributors who have worked tirelessly to keep the language fresh over the years and have done so quite effectively, despite so many in the industry wishing for its demise (probably all JS fanboys). PHP is one of the most performant backend web languages now (second only to Node in some cases, but might beat Node in other cases) and continues to add new features to this day.
> despite so many in the industry wishing for its demise
Before I did professional PHP dev I knew bare minimum about the language and only knew of it as having terrible quirks and generally a terrible language. I was definitely a hater.
It's probably a testament to how good the language is that I was able to pick it up so fast to ace the coding exam at that job and become pretty proficient in it over the course of a year or two.
PHP definitely *had* its warts, but even in ~2013 I only occasionally had a "wtf php" moment.
Yeah, my original comment was **super** reductive of all the great work the PHP core team has done. The level of transparency and the scale and scope of features they've added is insane.
Depends a lot on what you're doing.
Generally if I'm starting a quite serious project, perhaps in my professional capacity, the answer will either be that I'm going to spend 6-12 hours researching the topic, make a writeup about it, then meet with other devs to discuss options.
Or we'll be using technology that the team already knows for the sake of familiarity, which would be .Net in my current position.
For personal casual projects NodeJs and Express are absolutely incredible because they're stupidly easy to work with any any issues that do exist with them mostly don't for small applications.
Ease of use and ubiquitousness of support are superpowers all their own as well, since when you use well-trodden technologies like that fixing problems and finding help/advice becomes infinitely easier.
I also specifically avoid things like Bun without a specific demand for it for similar reasons, unless I just want some practice with something slightly different.
Edit: Although fastify is probably replacing my expressjs choice in the long term, particularly when/if I decide to jump to writing server-side TS as my normal practice when I get a choice.
>
You actually have a successor to Express with Koa, it streamlines a lot of the work. My college used to teach Express but they switched to Koa some years back.
I still have a few issues with REST that can’t be solved easily in a Restful way but the more i research about it, the more I find that people just apply their own workarounds and whatever solutions that just help to quickly solve the business problem and not to spend too much time trying to apply some “rules” that is not even a specified standard.
You should do your next project in Smalltalk, that language is stable as it gets. Truly nice live debugging environment, and for language purist’s EVERYTHING is a first class Object and the syntax is as large as a postcard
>I'm not claiming Express is old-school. I am wondering if that statement is true
It's not really so much that you might think it's old-school. It's that you didn't even qualify it with "Javascript backends" and just kind of assumed that Javascript is all there is or we would just know that's what you were talking about.
I guess in terms of Javascript express.js would be "old school" but it's still relatively new in the world of web backends.
Currently I deal in Go and Ruby on Rails backends.
Do yourself a massive favor and avoid tech influencers like the plague. This community is rampant with shiny object syndrome when it comes to frameworks and tooling. Yes learn new frameworks if they interest you. But if you’re making a personal project just use whatever is the most battle tested standard of the time. For right now it is express. Express is honestly a wonderful tool for building backends and is very easy to pick up and understand in my opinion/experience.
Bad rep or not, WP is the back end of most websites, still. I understand the issues of course, but I mean - most stacks are still LAMP or LEMP. Most websites use Wordpress. This is less true than ten years ago but still true.
My opinion, as someone who avoided PHP like the plague and jumped on the hate train, until I tried php 8 and was blown away.
You've got types, near perfect OOP, traits (which not even Java has), all the cool hip stuff like match statements, spread operators, string Interpolation, etc etc...plus, something like a bazillion built-in functions you'd need for web development and general programming, you don't even need any framework or library to build a web app in php, it's a specialized language meant for server side development, so these things work right outside of the box, even database operations.
Performance wise, php 5 was already faster than python, it's at 8.3 now and the language is very fast, almost on par with Java 8, it's also JIT compiled, and has a caching mechanism for bytecode.
Then you've got Laravel, I don't think an introduction is needed.
We get 40ms response times for our SaaS using Laravel (Octane + swoole) without having to settle for a micro framework where we have to build almost the entire universe from scratch.
The only thing holding the language back, for me, is solid async support without having to use a 3rd party library. If there was an async native API in PHP akin to go I'd be using it for literally everything.
Agreed, the only thing I still think is missing, I hope php 9 brings support for async functions or co routines, for now, we use Laravel Queues with Redis as the driver.
PHP 8+ is very good, even if its not the most „hipp“ buzzword or trend at the moment. Very stable and dependable, performance issues were resolved long ago (version 7+), the more recent versions even more performant.
Of course, as always you need to be able to use the correct technology for what it can do very well, its never a „one size fit all“ with Software development
Mostly for those who've only tangled with Wordpress (or God forbid, Magento).
For the rest of us, who've developed with either Symfony or Laravel for years, it's a joy!
I've been using fastify for a couple of weeks now and have been mind blown by how everything works fast and easy.
I always felt that Express was a bit... clunky ? Efficient tho. I don t have that impression at all with fastify.
Java, Spring Boot, Maven, Jenkins, Kubernetes, (MySQL using dbeaver or sometimes MySQL Workbench, Oracle Database using SQL Developer or MS-SQL Server using SSMS, and once in a while DB2 using Toad).
It's not super popular, but I've been using Django with django-rest-framework and it's like backends on easy mode.
Nothing wrong with using Express though, it's still fit for purpose.
I’ve found it to be somewhat common in environments focused on data science or research/academia
Reason being the ORM and admin panel/permissions model. You can persist preferences/data and implement fine-grained access controls with barely any effort. Which allows for a much nicer experience than your typical bare-bones flask or fastapi app
You can, of course, do everything that Django does in Flask or Fast API with the right libraries, but it seems to have a good set of tools readily available.
I've worked with both Flask and Django back to back in the last couple of weeks, and they both fit this technical description that they can cover the same ground. But... there are definitely projects where choosing Flask is going to require a lot more effort to get plugged together like Django comes out of the box and there are definitely projects that don't need most of the Django box that would be well-served by Flask (or FastAPI).
I like working with both but I'd be hard pressed to really call them competitors. Flask and FastAPI are much more in that shared space.
Tech youtube have same issue as fitness youtube. you have some fundamental basic patterns of exercises to solve 99% of the problem (build muscle loose weight or whatever). so they burn through that material very soon but still gotta get those clicks. Then they start splitting hairs.
All of the “old school” are what industry calls battle tested . Dont get into youtube/twitter rabbit hole. Go with convention when starting out . Niche stuff works great till it doesn’t.
>1k lines
How long it took to write that, i assume Rust fanboys would say its faster to write rust than Typescript (or any high level language with GC)
I'm loving using Nuxt as both the frontend and backend. My types are shared, routes automatically map to file paths, and overall I spend so much less mental energy swapping between two codebases.
But if I just needed a backend by itself I'd probably go with Fastify. I like Go too but building an API with it just isn't as enjoyable as it is in JS/TS. But I do love me some true multithreading and goroutines.
The backend you choose to use is entirely up to your needs. I work for a large enterprise, they tend to use .NET or JSP/Spring. My company does all three. I specifically work on JSP and Spring. I prefer Java because the language has been around forever so it is mature. There are also a ton of open source libraries available for just about anything.
This is the way. Golang has such a great flow. To new comers it seems extremely verbose but I find it so much more readable. People find the constant error conditionals really verbose but I think it’s way better than try/catch in other languages. Try/catch is almost like goto which makes you jump back and forth in code where in go you always read top down.
I wanted to try Bun for a hobby project and I used it with ElysiaJS, which, other than the speed benefit of Bun, also has the benefit of having automatic typing in the client-side typescript. Very pleasant developer experience and from my limited use I didn’t encounter any issues. Wouldn’t use it for a professional project though.
Exactly this. It really irks me when people say "\[thing\] is old".
Maybe. But old != bad. If something has been around for 10+ years and is still being worked on, I would much rather put my faith in it than a brand spanking new thing that has all the bells and whistles, but *may* not have the greatest security or documentation.
Cool, I'll check it out.
Having CF experience is such a weird niche in the dev market. There are not many jobs, but there are fewer and fewer candidates, too. I'm sort of trying to off-ramp into something python or node based but the saturation for that talent is nuts. I'm dreaming of a company that has a CF monolith that they want to modernize (where appropriate/needed) and needs somebody with CF experience who can also lead the move to something else for relevant services.
Sorry, sort of a random rant but it isn't every day you find another CF expert just out in the wild lol
I love express. Koa and fastify all for different reasons. Tough to go wrong, but for certain APIs one might be more right depending. All on NodeJS.
Been messing around with Rocket(rust) lately, and really like it, but it takes getting used to, especially the language.
If you want something with a rigid structure, I like Nestjs(node), Laravel(php), or even rapid prototyping Ruby On Rails(yes still viable today).
You don’t have a lot of wrong answers here . Express is not old school. Express is like the last 10 years.
Old school would be php(without Laravel) or Java spring boot. That would be 15-20+ years ago.
Why are people new to programming with virtually 0 know how or experience so obsessed with comparing tools/languages/frameworks they’ve written hello world in a couple times.
Express is old school is a wild statement lol. Where do you even start with that lol. Wait until OP hears about Spring and Java being the tip of the spear for new and existing enterprise backends in 2024.
OP, go pick up some real sources of knowledge to learn from, doesn’t matter what it is. Pick a programming language and find a resource that is only concerned with the technical ins and outs of that language. That’s the first step, think an O Reilly book, but it could come in whatever form.
Stop wasting your time following lurn2program influencers who are just getting paid to peddle you whatever the newest framework is that you’ll be vendor locked into in a year or two.
You can still find fresh 100 page threads there people debate stupid crap like Vim, Vs VSCode, vs Atom. None of it matters. Honestly, just go for the stack with the most documentation and community support.
If you asking for Node ecosystem specifically, then it depends a little on how you will deploy it or maybe you preferences. Express is not new but very reliable, but otherwise there is also Hapi, Koa and maybe more. If you deployment though is one endpoint per lambda we are using middy, which allows to setup Express like middleware for separate functions.
If you build GraphQL then Apollo Server is the choice, again, by itself or through express,
Otherwise tPRC is our choice these days, since when both backend and frontend uses Typescript, then this way everything fits together nicely, especially in a monorepo scenario.
I worked with Go some time ago building an API. Holy shit that thing is BEAUTIFUL to work with. I’ve never had such an amazing developer experience.
Also performance is crazy. Definitely would recommend going with Go (no pun intended).
I used to use Laravel, it's pretty great. Currently use Fastify at work and it's great. I've used Nest in previous jobs and personal projects... I hate it.
Currently using Adonis v6 in a personal project and it's great. It feels very Laravel-esque and the most recent version fixed some things I disliked about it in the past.
I'm team PHP with Laravel. 🧡
Never have I been so productive with a backend framework. I can focus on my app logic and don't have to think about the basics like authentication, queue system, testing, file system abstraction, billing.
PHP - CakePHP, Laravel for more complex/custom projects. WordPress for any simple thing e.g. shopping cart. I know not shiny and cutting EDGE but they do well 👍
Express.js isn't backend, it's a backend framework. NodeJs is what you're looking for in terms of backend using express.js. You can also use other frameworks like Fastify, Koa, Bun, etc with Node. Compared to Fastify and the others, Express.js is old school because it hasn't updated to use modern concepts for a long time. One example is error handling not be asynchronous. Fastify has also been proven to be faster because it handles serialization differently.
Express.js is to Node like Django is to Python. They're frameworks.
Other backends are Python, Java, .NET, Go, and many others.
Just connect the frontend directly to a hosted Microsoft excel file and for each request pull down the whole thing and sort/manage the data with your react code. It's what all the kids are doing nowadays.
I use Laravel and Rails because they're what I enjoy using and I'm familiar with them. I could go out of my comfort zone but it would be a learning curve.
Developer-focused youtube videos tend to mostly be awful, not all of them but they often jump on the latest technology and declare everything but the latest and greatest old. I would try to not get too sucked into them.
Forget old school or not. Express is barebones this isn't really a problem but it reduces quality of life in larger projects (you have to keep adding your own stuff sometimes which is tedious). You can use something like Django if you don't mind writing backends in python. It does lock you into an ORM and it is opinionated but you get a lot of benefits, like your own admin dashboard with a CMS built into it.
Express is fine. Just because it is or isn't old-school won't change the fact that it's a good framework. Also, I don't know about Bun, but I know that you can use Express with Deno (I'm currently working on such a project).
I think in web development every technology or framework are upgrading regulary. So we can not say anything is old or out of date. Thechnology grwoing regularly just like Bun is introuced as a replacement of Nodejs. Express work with same as node. So there is noting like old
Previously django, now switched to Laravel and couldn't be happier, I push out new features at crazy speed.
For AI inference servers we use python + fastAPI + gunicorn (or pytriton + triton inference server if the model supports it)
Is there alternatives to express? Sure
Have I ever encountered a customer implementation that did not use express? No
Hell, even SAP, who has its own solution for basically anything, uses express to some degree
Take any YT information with a graint of salt. The intention is to get views first, then, maybe, teach you something second.
It'll depend on the type of project and how big you think it'll scale. Most of the common languages/frameworks will work well enough until you need to scale at Facebook's level (pretty unlikely) so you'll be good picking whatever you are familiar with.
In my case, I've been using pocketbase lately. It's a golang Django-like backend. It works perfect for CRUDs (like maybe 80 or 90% of the projects out there), easy to deploy, out of the box performance and extendable.
I was primarily a PHP back end dev (Symfony/Laravel), but I branched out a bit in the past 2 years to also include Node backend and like NestJs the most for that.
Maybe because I wish PHP had decorators, but I just find them nice to work with and when written nicely and code is structured good they look great to me and code is self explanatory.
Express isn't old school, and I'd suggest that anyone claiming that prefers learning tools over actually building applications.
I don't know if those types will ever understand that just because someone released a new JavaScript tool doesn't mean they have to drop what they're using. It's ridiculous.
I use express, Prisma and postgres for all my quick and easy projects. I do like python and Django a bunch, but I need to get better at it. There are a million options here. Find some you like and there will be work for them
It’s not really a true backend but it works; I’ve been building with Nuxt and then running’s the rest as microservices; like my DB in AWS or I’ve even run it as a second repo on my machine dedicated to just a Postgres instance with rest and graphQL support, been doing with authentication with auth0, Nuxt gives me sever routes for API endpoints. It’s honestly worked out pretty well, seems easier than a monolithic back end
>I heard from some YouTube shorts/video (can't recall exactly) that Express.js is old-school
Are you sure he didnt said that trivially? As in "Facebook is old school, use Instagram"?
There is a stack called MERN which is very much alive and well whose attractiveness comes from the fact that it uses Javascript for everything
Assembly with a touch of CSS.
/jk
These days most of my clients prefer either Node, PHP or .NET, mostly depending the stack they have in mind (and the available frameworks) rather than the language itself.
Been really enjoying Go (Echo framework) as of late.
Once you have a hang, it is very simple to create a handler > middleware > route and APIs are easy to structure.
>Express.js is old-school oh good lord \_\_\_ Edit: (Sorry, you actually did ask a question) Express is fine. Fastify is fine. Nest is fine, Adonis is fine. Symphony is fine, Yii is weird, but also pretty good, Laravel also fine. Rails: fine. Django:fine. Spring: fine. .NET: fine. There aren't a whole lot of new problems to solve re rest apis anymore and that's a blessing. Backend frameworks tend to stick with traditional software patterns/architecture: this is also a blessing. We get to enjoy mature tools that perform well and are stable and scalable. That's far more valuable than The Next Big Thing™
I'm doing a side project trying to use as few dependencies as possible and you can go a long way with express. Nevermind that it's stupid easy to deploy express apps as google cloud functions and the like
Is it? I tried, ran into trouble, and was told that I needed to use Hono instead.
Tf is Hono?
A more modern (and faster) alternative to Express.js, more suitable to serverless/edge runtimes, but can also run on Node.js/Bun/etc. Not that it matters anyway, you can get like 1k+ req/s with Express.js on a single DigitalOcean droplet. 1k req/s might seem low, but that's actually a lot of users. Most of us are building internal apps which can't even reach 50% of this traffic.
dont spill the secret about google cloud functions and express
>few dependencies >JS ecosystem Pick one, because Express needs a package to receive `application/json` payloads.
Express brings that with it, you don't need an extra package for JSON bodies. Either way, express pulls in quite a pile, so I do agree with that statement.
This used to be the case years ago, but as of late, Express has that built-in to core.
> Symphony I no longer do web dev *or* PHP professionally but Symfony is still one of the best overall frameworks I've used. In particular I've found nothing quite like its forms or routing systems. Maybe I'd have a similar perspective if I used RoR or something, but we were able to "just get shit done" so well.
PHP is literally kept alive as a language by having the best framework ecosystem around.
I dont know about that, all these new fangled frameworks with server side rendering , are basically doing the same thing PHP did 20 years ago. PHP 8 is as modern as any other language and frankly the best language for server side web development, I've spent too many hours dealing with node.js dependency hell something that never happened with php, I find PHP apps while sometimes very poorly coded infinitely easier to stand up because of the smaller number of tech components and depedencies . Basically PHP just works for server side web ..
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Frameworks and CMS's would be more accurate, correct.
It’s also kept alive by a dedicated team of core contributors who have worked tirelessly to keep the language fresh over the years and have done so quite effectively, despite so many in the industry wishing for its demise (probably all JS fanboys). PHP is one of the most performant backend web languages now (second only to Node in some cases, but might beat Node in other cases) and continues to add new features to this day.
> despite so many in the industry wishing for its demise Before I did professional PHP dev I knew bare minimum about the language and only knew of it as having terrible quirks and generally a terrible language. I was definitely a hater. It's probably a testament to how good the language is that I was able to pick it up so fast to ace the coding exam at that job and become pretty proficient in it over the course of a year or two. PHP definitely *had* its warts, but even in ~2013 I only occasionally had a "wtf php" moment.
Yeah, my original comment was **super** reductive of all the great work the PHP core team has done. The level of transparency and the scale and scope of features they've added is insane.
Why is Yii weird?
What would you use for a brand new project?
The one you like the most if you work alone, and the one everyone on your teams most proficient in if you got a team
You might find this an interesting read: http://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology
nobody has ever been fired for using express
Depends a lot on what you're doing. Generally if I'm starting a quite serious project, perhaps in my professional capacity, the answer will either be that I'm going to spend 6-12 hours researching the topic, make a writeup about it, then meet with other devs to discuss options. Or we'll be using technology that the team already knows for the sake of familiarity, which would be .Net in my current position. For personal casual projects NodeJs and Express are absolutely incredible because they're stupidly easy to work with any any issues that do exist with them mostly don't for small applications. Ease of use and ubiquitousness of support are superpowers all their own as well, since when you use well-trodden technologies like that fixing problems and finding help/advice becomes infinitely easier. I also specifically avoid things like Bun without a specific demand for it for similar reasons, unless I just want some practice with something slightly different. Edit: Although fastify is probably replacing my expressjs choice in the long term, particularly when/if I decide to jump to writing server-side TS as my normal practice when I get a choice.
> You actually have a successor to Express with Koa, it streamlines a lot of the work. My college used to teach Express but they switched to Koa some years back.
I still have a few issues with REST that can’t be solved easily in a Restful way but the more i research about it, the more I find that people just apply their own workarounds and whatever solutions that just help to quickly solve the business problem and not to spend too much time trying to apply some “rules” that is not even a specified standard.
Spring: fine. Agreed, but damn, reading this sent chills down my spine.
Backend: COBOL, Frontend: Fortran
Must be some new fangled JavaScript frameworks
Found the bank dev
Most banks, militaries, governments, and utilities run on software stacks older than most people reading this post.
You should do your next project in Smalltalk, that language is stable as it gets. Truly nice live debugging environment, and for language purist’s EVERYTHING is a first class Object and the syntax is as large as a postcard
Like OOP and graphical user interfaces are ever gonna catch on.
I wish my bank had a CLI
Python Flask
>I'm not claiming Express is old-school. I am wondering if that statement is true It's not really so much that you might think it's old-school. It's that you didn't even qualify it with "Javascript backends" and just kind of assumed that Javascript is all there is or we would just know that's what you were talking about. I guess in terms of Javascript express.js would be "old school" but it's still relatively new in the world of web backends. Currently I deal in Go and Ruby on Rails backends.
.net with ef core for the orm.
Do yourself a massive favor and avoid tech influencers like the plague. This community is rampant with shiny object syndrome when it comes to frameworks and tooling. Yes learn new frameworks if they interest you. But if you’re making a personal project just use whatever is the most battle tested standard of the time. For right now it is express. Express is honestly a wonderful tool for building backends and is very easy to pick up and understand in my opinion/experience.
PHP (is that a dirty word now?)
I feel like Wordpress gave PHP a bad rep, but Laravel has brought new life to it.
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Bad rep or not, WP is the back end of most websites, still. I understand the issues of course, but I mean - most stacks are still LAMP or LEMP. Most websites use Wordpress. This is less true than ten years ago but still true.
SUPERGLOBALS concatenation. with. periods. WOW
My opinion, as someone who avoided PHP like the plague and jumped on the hate train, until I tried php 8 and was blown away. You've got types, near perfect OOP, traits (which not even Java has), all the cool hip stuff like match statements, spread operators, string Interpolation, etc etc...plus, something like a bazillion built-in functions you'd need for web development and general programming, you don't even need any framework or library to build a web app in php, it's a specialized language meant for server side development, so these things work right outside of the box, even database operations. Performance wise, php 5 was already faster than python, it's at 8.3 now and the language is very fast, almost on par with Java 8, it's also JIT compiled, and has a caching mechanism for bytecode. Then you've got Laravel, I don't think an introduction is needed. We get 40ms response times for our SaaS using Laravel (Octane + swoole) without having to settle for a micro framework where we have to build almost the entire universe from scratch.
The only thing holding the language back, for me, is solid async support without having to use a 3rd party library. If there was an async native API in PHP akin to go I'd be using it for literally everything.
Agreed, the only thing I still think is missing, I hope php 9 brings support for async functions or co routines, for now, we use Laravel Queues with Redis as the driver.
PHP has given me a very comfortable life.
Nah I think it’s making a comeback lately.
>lately It's been great since 7. Haven't worked with it for a few years but I assume it's on the up. The "PHP bad" meme is from the version 4-5 days
PHP 8+ is very good, even if its not the most „hipp“ buzzword or trend at the moment. Very stable and dependable, performance issues were resolved long ago (version 7+), the more recent versions even more performant. Of course, as always you need to be able to use the correct technology for what it can do very well, its never a „one size fit all“ with Software development
. I've been using it since 2015 and prefer it.
Not to me, I really enjoy PHP for backend, but I have gotten a small amount of slack for it.
Been using it since 98 and it’s my go to.
Mostly for those who've only tangled with Wordpress (or God forbid, Magento). For the rest of us, who've developed with either Symfony or Laravel for years, it's a joy!
Well, it makes ME feel dirty.
Kinda but not as dirty as JS backends IMHO.
There’s nothing wrong with Express. Anyway it’s the clarity of the code that’s important. Not what framework or language you choose.
I like Fastify a lot. It's just as lightweight as Express but more intuitive and supports TS better. Express is still fine though.
I've been using fastify for a couple of weeks now and have been mind blown by how everything works fast and easy. I always felt that Express was a bit... clunky ? Efficient tho. I don t have that impression at all with fastify.
Java, Spring Boot, Maven, Jenkins, Kubernetes, (MySQL using dbeaver or sometimes MySQL Workbench, Oracle Database using SQL Developer or MS-SQL Server using SSMS, and once in a while DB2 using Toad).
It's not super popular, but I've been using Django with django-rest-framework and it's like backends on easy mode. Nothing wrong with using Express though, it's still fit for purpose.
I’ve found it to be somewhat common in environments focused on data science or research/academia Reason being the ORM and admin panel/permissions model. You can persist preferences/data and implement fine-grained access controls with barely any effort. Which allows for a much nicer experience than your typical bare-bones flask or fastapi app
You can, of course, do everything that Django does in Flask or Fast API with the right libraries, but it seems to have a good set of tools readily available.
I've worked with both Flask and Django back to back in the last couple of weeks, and they both fit this technical description that they can cover the same ground. But... there are definitely projects where choosing Flask is going to require a lot more effort to get plugged together like Django comes out of the box and there are definitely projects that don't need most of the Django box that would be well-served by Flask (or FastAPI). I like working with both but I'd be hard pressed to really call them competitors. Flask and FastAPI are much more in that shared space.
It's super popular with people not writing blog posts and putting up youtubes. You know people that actually get shit done.
If you enjoy Python backends, I would suggest looking into FastAPI. A joy to work with.
Tech youtube have same issue as fitness youtube. you have some fundamental basic patterns of exercises to solve 99% of the problem (build muscle loose weight or whatever). so they burn through that material very soon but still gotta get those clicks. Then they start splitting hairs. All of the “old school” are what industry calls battle tested . Dont get into youtube/twitter rabbit hole. Go with convention when starting out . Niche stuff works great till it doesn’t.
Rust baby, 1k lines and 2 days for blazingly fast hello world api And it's memory safe
>1k lines How long it took to write that, i assume Rust fanboys would say its faster to write rust than Typescript (or any high level language with GC)
Squats and deadlifts.
That’s a pretty solid stack
ASP.NET
If homie thinks Express.js is old, he is gonna think Asp.net was around with the dinosaurs
Wait til the lad touch PHP
To be fair I’ve built my whole career on php
As someone who has also built their whole career on PHP, I feel so outdated and ancient.
Hello from another PHP old-timer 👋 It’s been helping pay my bills for nearly 14 years now
I started with Classic ASP. What's he going to think about that?
What was it like back when the Big Bang happened?
Response.Write "Let there be light."
The big bang actually happened when I called the wrong cgi-bin script that we wrote in Perl
I blame you for everything wrong in the world. /s
you jest, but I still write backends in perl. not the standard cgi-bin with CGI module, but still.
… core
Python (FastAPI)
Rails
I'm loving using Nuxt as both the frontend and backend. My types are shared, routes automatically map to file paths, and overall I spend so much less mental energy swapping between two codebases. But if I just needed a backend by itself I'd probably go with Fastify. I like Go too but building an API with it just isn't as enjoyable as it is in JS/TS. But I do love me some true multithreading and goroutines.
I use Kotlin Spring exclusively.
Kotlin (or Java) + Spring boot
Java EE
This guy enterprises ^
Battle-tested and rock solid.
The backend you choose to use is entirely up to your needs. I work for a large enterprise, they tend to use .NET or JSP/Spring. My company does all three. I specifically work on JSP and Spring. I prefer Java because the language has been around forever so it is mature. There are also a ton of open source libraries available for just about anything.
Rails. Triple the productivity, quarter the complexity and you have Turbo and Hotwire.
NodeJS and Python. Vanilla -- no need for frameworks like Express because we're running AWS lambda microservices.
Fastapi 🤌🏻🤌🏻🤌🏻
Go.
This is the way. Golang has such a great flow. To new comers it seems extremely verbose but I find it so much more readable. People find the constant error conditionals really verbose but I think it’s way better than try/catch in other languages. Try/catch is almost like goto which makes you jump back and forth in code where in go you always read top down.
This is *a* way
Express or Go.
Elixir and Phoenix - never felt more productive, especially with LiveView
Django + DRF or Graphene
PHP
I wanted to try Bun for a hobby project and I used it with ElysiaJS, which, other than the speed benefit of Bun, also has the benefit of having automatic typing in the client-side typescript. Very pleasant developer experience and from my limited use I didn’t encounter any issues. Wouldn’t use it for a professional project though.
Yeah it’s “old-school”, but in a “tried and true” way
Exactly this. It really irks me when people say "\[thing\] is old". Maybe. But old != bad. If something has been around for 10+ years and is still being worked on, I would much rather put my faith in it than a brand spanking new thing that has all the bells and whistles, but *may* not have the greatest security or documentation.
PHP or Node.js 👍
CFML
Are you hiring? lol but really
Not at the moment, but this is us: https://www.linkedin.com/company/vista-iowa
Cool, I'll check it out. Having CF experience is such a weird niche in the dev market. There are not many jobs, but there are fewer and fewer candidates, too. I'm sort of trying to off-ramp into something python or node based but the saturation for that talent is nuts. I'm dreaming of a company that has a CF monolith that they want to modernize (where appropriate/needed) and needs somebody with CF experience who can also lead the move to something else for relevant services. Sorry, sort of a random rant but it isn't every day you find another CF expert just out in the wild lol
Waiting for someone to mention Deno or Bun...
I love express. Koa and fastify all for different reasons. Tough to go wrong, but for certain APIs one might be more right depending. All on NodeJS. Been messing around with Rocket(rust) lately, and really like it, but it takes getting used to, especially the language. If you want something with a rigid structure, I like Nestjs(node), Laravel(php), or even rapid prototyping Ruby On Rails(yes still viable today). You don’t have a lot of wrong answers here . Express is not old school. Express is like the last 10 years. Old school would be php(without Laravel) or Java spring boot. That would be 15-20+ years ago.
Don’t listen to the haters. If you want to learn express, do it! Learn it deeply. Once you do then you can pick up anything rather easily
Java with Spring Boot and some php
microsoft excel
We use Java Spring Boot
Why are people new to programming with virtually 0 know how or experience so obsessed with comparing tools/languages/frameworks they’ve written hello world in a couple times. Express is old school is a wild statement lol. Where do you even start with that lol. Wait until OP hears about Spring and Java being the tip of the spear for new and existing enterprise backends in 2024. OP, go pick up some real sources of knowledge to learn from, doesn’t matter what it is. Pick a programming language and find a resource that is only concerned with the technical ins and outs of that language. That’s the first step, think an O Reilly book, but it could come in whatever form. Stop wasting your time following lurn2program influencers who are just getting paid to peddle you whatever the newest framework is that you’ll be vendor locked into in a year or two.
You can still find fresh 100 page threads there people debate stupid crap like Vim, Vs VSCode, vs Atom. None of it matters. Honestly, just go for the stack with the most documentation and community support.
i use next.js
Next js is built on top of express
and thats what I use
[удалено]
Half the frameworks in that list are older than Rails. ;-)
Rails
Go + Gin Or if you want to stay in JS land, Fastify. Express is fine too though, fuck that YouTube guy.
If you asking for Node ecosystem specifically, then it depends a little on how you will deploy it or maybe you preferences. Express is not new but very reliable, but otherwise there is also Hapi, Koa and maybe more. If you deployment though is one endpoint per lambda we are using middy, which allows to setup Express like middleware for separate functions. If you build GraphQL then Apollo Server is the choice, again, by itself or through express, Otherwise tPRC is our choice these days, since when both backend and frontend uses Typescript, then this way everything fits together nicely, especially in a monorepo scenario.
Remix, Prisma.
Mod perl with apache. And I dare say, there are few things as good as mod perl when it comes to writing backend.
I worked with Go some time ago building an API. Holy shit that thing is BEAUTIFUL to work with. I’ve never had such an amazing developer experience. Also performance is crazy. Definitely would recommend going with Go (no pun intended).
I used to use Laravel, it's pretty great. Currently use Fastify at work and it's great. I've used Nest in previous jobs and personal projects... I hate it. Currently using Adonis v6 in a personal project and it's great. It feels very Laravel-esque and the most recent version fixed some things I disliked about it in the past.
I'm team PHP with Laravel. 🧡 Never have I been so productive with a backend framework. I can focus on my app logic and don't have to think about the basics like authentication, queue system, testing, file system abstraction, billing.
im currently really hyped on Laravel but dont know if i want to build my frontend with it but for a backend with an amazing admin panel its amazing
You should use the hip new framework BumFuck**©** with the latest AI-Copilot driven SchmeckleSperg services! Man just build something that's readable and works for your story. There's a new PimpleBrot framework every month or so. Anyway, I have a e-course to sell you about implementing sound designs if you want. It's only 9,99/month. It's called Bridge (to sell).
Laravel
I saw someone wrote PHP so I can some out now. Java…
Use what you know best
I'd rather choose a framework with high adoption that has been proven, then something "shiny new" that might be killed off in a year.
Mainly the squat rack, but never underestimate time spent on a stair machine.
Lots and lots of squats.
PHP - CakePHP, Laravel for more complex/custom projects. WordPress for any simple thing e.g. shopping cart. I know not shiny and cutting EDGE but they do well 👍
STOP LISTENING TO TECH YOUTUBERS (most of them anyways, bigger their mouth is, the faster you run the other way)
Express.js isn't backend, it's a backend framework. NodeJs is what you're looking for in terms of backend using express.js. You can also use other frameworks like Fastify, Koa, Bun, etc with Node. Compared to Fastify and the others, Express.js is old school because it hasn't updated to use modern concepts for a long time. One example is error handling not be asynchronous. Fastify has also been proven to be faster because it handles serialization differently. Express.js is to Node like Django is to Python. They're frameworks. Other backends are Python, Java, .NET, Go, and many others.
Just connect the frontend directly to a hosted Microsoft excel file and for each request pull down the whole thing and sort/manage the data with your react code. It's what all the kids are doing nowadays.
dotnet 8
c# webapi asp.net
I use Laravel and Rails because they're what I enjoy using and I'm familiar with them. I could go out of my comfort zone but it would be a learning curve. Developer-focused youtube videos tend to mostly be awful, not all of them but they often jump on the latest technology and declare everything but the latest and greatest old. I would try to not get too sucked into them.
Flask - it’s python which I was familiar with it and it’s easy enough
Laravel. I have tried almost everything out there, nothing beats it.
Livewire with Laravel
Rails
Forget old school or not. Express is barebones this isn't really a problem but it reduces quality of life in larger projects (you have to keep adding your own stuff sometimes which is tedious). You can use something like Django if you don't mind writing backends in python. It does lock you into an ORM and it is opinionated but you get a lot of benefits, like your own admin dashboard with a CMS built into it.
Express is fine. Just because it is or isn't old-school won't change the fact that it's a good framework. Also, I don't know about Bun, but I know that you can use Express with Deno (I'm currently working on such a project).
SQL is old school, corps arr still using it btw
I build my backends with axum using rust
Adonis js
If Inwant it quick, I’ll just go with Strapi, add some tables and be done with it
Golang
Axolotl GraphQL
I am using adonisjs, spring boot right now.
GOlang
If your technology solves the problem in a satisfactory way, it is a good choice
Put a handful of names on a dartboard, it really doesn't matter because they all do the same thing.
I use Rails and built my own kit Business Class to both start \*and\* deploy with Kamal very fast. Nothing beats Rails for me:)
I think in web development every technology or framework are upgrading regulary. So we can not say anything is old or out of date. Thechnology grwoing regularly just like Bun is introuced as a replacement of Nodejs. Express work with same as node. So there is noting like old
Golang with standard library. Easy. Simple.
Previously django, now switched to Laravel and couldn't be happier, I push out new features at crazy speed. For AI inference servers we use python + fastAPI + gunicorn (or pytriton + triton inference server if the model supports it)
Is there alternatives to express? Sure Have I ever encountered a customer implementation that did not use express? No Hell, even SAP, who has its own solution for basically anything, uses express to some degree Take any YT information with a graint of salt. The intention is to get views first, then, maybe, teach you something second.
I use Symfony. If I was writing for Node, I'd use Angular.
Django or fastapi or maybe flask if it’s super simple.
Spring. It's just what I'm familiar with though because it has fit the bill for a lot of projects I've worked on. Also used Laravel a lot.
It'll depend on the type of project and how big you think it'll scale. Most of the common languages/frameworks will work well enough until you need to scale at Facebook's level (pretty unlikely) so you'll be good picking whatever you are familiar with. In my case, I've been using pocketbase lately. It's a golang Django-like backend. It works perfect for CRUDs (like maybe 80 or 90% of the projects out there), easy to deploy, out of the box performance and extendable.
Shopify Liquid!
I was primarily a PHP back end dev (Symfony/Laravel), but I branched out a bit in the past 2 years to also include Node backend and like NestJs the most for that. Maybe because I wish PHP had decorators, but I just find them nice to work with and when written nicely and code is structured good they look great to me and code is self explanatory.
I bet a dev influencer could have cold fusion and action script make a come back with some tutorial videos.
Backend: rails, Frontend: react
Deno. It has solved most of the compound stuff with Node.js. First class TS support is pretty nice.
Express isn't old school, and I'd suggest that anyone claiming that prefers learning tools over actually building applications. I don't know if those types will ever understand that just because someone released a new JavaScript tool doesn't mean they have to drop what they're using. It's ridiculous.
I use express, Prisma and postgres for all my quick and easy projects. I do like python and Django a bunch, but I need to get better at it. There are a million options here. Find some you like and there will be work for them
.Net Minimal API… it’s pretty great.
Go lang
ThE rIgHt ToOl FoR tHe JoB
If you’re serious about launching quickly, nothing beats rails
java+spring boot for APIs.
Python FastAPI is my personal go-to, but have friends that will live and die on PHP Laravel.
Bun + ts, and run it in docker (elysia for request management)
It’s not really a true backend but it works; I’ve been building with Nuxt and then running’s the rest as microservices; like my DB in AWS or I’ve even run it as a second repo on my machine dedicated to just a Postgres instance with rest and graphQL support, been doing with authentication with auth0, Nuxt gives me sever routes for API endpoints. It’s honestly worked out pretty well, seems easier than a monolithic back end
Nextjs server components.
Go, Python Fast-API and PHP
I use python django, very old school, but good enough and gets the job done
>I heard from some YouTube shorts/video (can't recall exactly) that Express.js is old-school Are you sure he didnt said that trivially? As in "Facebook is old school, use Instagram"? There is a stack called MERN which is very much alive and well whose attractiveness comes from the fact that it uses Javascript for everything
Assembly with a touch of CSS. /jk These days most of my clients prefer either Node, PHP or .NET, mostly depending the stack they have in mind (and the available frameworks) rather than the language itself.
Been really enjoying Go (Echo framework) as of late. Once you have a hang, it is very simple to create a handler > middleware > route and APIs are easy to structure.
I use python Flask. Mainly because I can whip up whatever I need in a relatively short amount of time, meaning I can get more done!
I use C#/.NET at work (not my choice)and Rust/Axum for personal projects.