What's the lowest churn web stack?
Have you found a web stack you love that suffer from churn.
I'm starting to realise the inefficiencies in keeping JS tooling up to date is a massive drain on resources. Is there a better option?
In my opinion: Ruby On Rails. It has an awesome community, lots of gems (libraries) for web stuff. An opinionated way of doing frontend and backend. No waste of time taking decisions about what state management to use, how to organize stuff, etc. Just focus on stable, accepted, well maintained conventions and focus on your business problems instead.
It might be harder to find people interested in working with it depending where you are, but I guarantee you that you will need a lot less people to build the same thing with lower level tools (SPAs, Go, Erlang, Rust, whatever...).
I would also say Django, but the problem with it is that it just solves the backend side of things. You will still have to find an answer for how to do the frontend as it has no opinions there (and the templating and forms stuff it has built in falls really short in my experience).
I've heard good things about php/symfony, but never used it myself.
PHP has calmed quite down over the years. The framework wars have been mostly decided between a handful of them, we dont have much in the way of package management issues and you dont have to compile it.
Anything server-side-rendered is going to be low churn compared to the JS world. My backend framework of choice is Django.
I would put Laravel/PHP against anything else out there right now. Based on my (albeit limited) experiences with Node.js and Java/SpringBoot, I would choose Laravel for the vast majority of applications.
I recommend (subjectively of course) Ruby on Rails.
It is a full-stack offering together with Ruby Gems ecosystem solutions to a wide range of things that I want to achieve with a webapp. I like a lot how people in this community tries to simplify a lot of the complexities of modern tools.
In the Ruby (and Rails ecosystem) you should take a look at https://hotwire.dev - helping create amazing web apps with less Javascript code. There are a lot of things to like there, but you can start small with Stimulus JS, which for me offers good enough JS code to do small UI things.
Then there is https://docs.stimulusreflex.com - for creating reactive web apps without going full SPA mode.
And here it is the latest addition to this eco-system (that I know of): https://github.com/rails/tailwindcss-rails. This is integrating Tailwind directly in assets pipeline of Rails. No need to configure webpack and postcss and whatever other configs. You can directly use Tailwind by adding this gem.
EmberJS is probably the most stable of the frontend frameworks in that it's very internally consistent and opinionated. As far as the back-end goes, I think PHP, Rails and Django are all pretty stable, but I'm not familiar with the microsoft stack.
I mean I always use a simple express server for json api/websockets/some routes for auth, static assets behind cdn. Where is the churn here?
You can swap out the frontend end for whatever framework you want, your api layer is thin, you can swap that out too. Where are you guys getting trapped in churn? The server side rendering bullshit?
React with Django handling url routing and user sessions. Single page applications reduce footprint of javascript tooling.
> What's the lowest churn web stack?
cgi-bin/ obviously. But sometimes you can get away with just public_html.
Rails, PHP, or Django. Tried and tested, strong communities.
SPA w/ AngularJS 1.x and Flask on the backend.
Clojure/Script and libraries
Been using vanilla-js for over 20 years with server-side rendered web applications. Almost no churn. Only thing missing is a nice password dialog, so drop a link if you know one.
Use create-react-app and don’t eject or add any fancy custom tooling. Nest.js is pretty good on the backend.