At the beginning, for what I recall, there were Microsoft FrontPage, Netscape Composer and Adobe Flash. Then arrived the era of the one-function scripts, first in Perl, then in PHP, then the CMSs in PHP and C hash / C net. On the side, without really getting much “mainstream”, the CMS in python (Plone/Django) and Ruby on Rails.. but now, which are the “mainstream” technological stacks to develop the server-side of web sites/Apps? Node.js ? Still PHP ? It doesn’t matter/evolve because everyone uses mobile apps?
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My favorite stack is Node.js/Express.js for the backend, and Vue.js/Vuetify.js for the front end. These are all very popular frameworks, but the JavaScript world is an insane, fast-paced jungle with way too many frameworks/options that are nearly impossible to keep up with…
As an aside, I was just exploring Tauri a few days ago, and was thinking how cool it would be to have a Julia equivalent.
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It all depends on what you need the website to do. I’m perennially amazed at how much you can do without a backend, especially when coupled with on-demand and/or scheduled updates. A perfect example I stumbled across just yesterday is OpenTimes — “just” a static Hugo site processing 300GBs worth of pre-computed parquets, all hosted for ~$10/mo without a server. I think the basic premise should speak to the audience here: GitHub Actions are powerful!
That said, it’s hard to not mention wordpress. It still reigns supreme by sheer volume and its ancient LAMP stack is a long-running classic. But even then, most get plopped behind an aggressive caching engine for all that server-side goodness. Why not just push that cache all the way back to the generation of the site itself?
The main reason to do something dynamic these days is if you absolutely need logins and individualized content.
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