Is LAMP still popular?
@csalvato is probably the guy who would know.
I wouldn't say LAMP is too popular anymore, unless you're building on Wordpress.
40% of the sites on the internet run on Wordpress, including some early stage SaaS, so it's popular in that sense.
But this is usually a misguided stack choice in 2021 unless it's a marketing site or blog you're creating.
Web apps being built on LAMP usually stems from people dabbling in Wordpress and expanding on it ad infinitum, not realizing there are better, more scalable, more web-app focused solutions out there. Or reading a book on how to program on the web from the early to mid 2000s.
like MJ did, I also want to build a SaaS website(car dealership) from scratch and start a business by myself. WordPress won't work since it will be a highly customized website. at first MERN stack looked ideal but ironically it being too flexible and unopinionated, which was the reason I chose it, makes me feel lost, don't know what to choose from tones of third-party libraries and how to organize the project from scratch. I even heard that mongoDB is bad.
now I'm thinking that high-learning-curved and opinionated technologies like Angular could be better in the long run, making my projects better organized and easier to maintain without it being messy. also thinking if I better go for rdbms over mongoDB for the same manner. but on the other hand, I doubt if it really worth investing that much time to dealing with the steep learning curve of those technologies when I have easier alternatives and I'm not doing all these to become a dedicated web developer.
I know it depends and it's my choice but want to hear your experiences/opinions. thank you very much.
I understand the source of your question and wish there was a good answer for you.
Unfortunately, there's not.
Software development (particular web software development) is in a very fragmented and divergent state right now. Understanding everything that's going on in the ecosystem is impossible, let alone describing it.
The advice that I normally give to people who want to write their own software is to minimize their choices down to a few technologies that are proven at scale, and are known to have very rapid development cycles.
In my experience, these three bubble to the top of the list (of course, there are many others, these are just the top 3 in my humble opinion):
- Ruby on Rails
- Laravel (like Rails, but for people who prefer PHP)
- Django (a different take on a web framework, and written in Python)
- Are proven to enable developers to churn out well tested, sustainable features very quickly
- There's a large enough talent pool for each of them, which means hiring highly competent employees and freelancers is much easier.
- They each have conventions around them that you and your team can stick to, which means scaling a team on these technologies is easier (compared to having the whole team decide on every little decision, like you need to do with Node.js)
- There are terrific services like Heroku which take all the infrastructure concerns off your hand, which lets you focus on just solving problems for customers until you get to a certain level of scale
If you don't know one of these languages (Ruby, PHP or Python) more than any other, take a tutorial on each of these frameworks (each one should take you about 1-3 weeks), and you will have a good idea of which one feels the most right to you.
You can get very far in creating a SaaS that solves real business problems with the vanilla form of any of these frameworks, and minimal JavaScript interaction.
I think we are heading in the wrong direction where people think they can just write JavaScript and write terrific software. JavaScript should make your site more delightful and reactive; your business logic needs to be handled on the back end - not done on the front end then offloaded to another provider like Firebase, imo.
Hope that helps.
Last edited: