HACKER Q&A
📣 boplicity

What web development stack offers the best long-term support?


Hi HN! I'm a very occasional web developer, who usually work solo on projects. The problem I've run into is that I'll set up a piece of software, using a framework such as Laravel, and then not need to update it for a couple of years. However, when I go back to updating is, usually much of the tooling is broken, and the framework is out of dates, not getting any security updates, etc. I don't usually have time to update to the latest "version" of the framework that is being actively developed, in addition to the usually day-long process of figuring out why something like grunt or webpack isn't working properly.

Hence my question: What tools, frameworks, etc, move slowly, in terms of development, and are easy to work with? What web development stack is the least likely to break after not touching it for a few years, or even a decade?

Any insights are appreciated. Thank you!

  👤 mooreds Accepted Answer ✓
I'd look for LTS support for your framework. For instance, Symfony has an LTS release and a more regularly released "stable support" release. The LTS has 3 years of support: https://symfony.com/releases

I'm not aware of all the frameworks that have these types of LTS support, but that's what I'd look for.

👤 theandrewbailey
Java EE is incredibly stable and backwards compatible, but it might not have all that you're looking for in a framework.
👤 Jugurtha
We've been using Flask, Bootstrap, and vanilla JavaScript for years now. We also do TypeScript because our product offers a Jupyter notebook experience with super-powers, however. [collaborative editing, scheduled long-running notebooks, automatic experiment tracking, deployment, monitoring, etc].
👤 runawaybottle
Long answer:

My advice is to look for something that doesn’t have that compilation step (avoid angular/react) as I think 8 years from now someone is going to have a hell of a time compiling a legacy app in webpack.

Short answer: Jquery

👤 psikomanjak
ExpressJS hasn't been updated in two years and is one of the widely used frameworks out there. It has matured enough it doesn't need to be updated.
👤 imvetri
wordpress