Web application development stack

The article is a part of Code Inspiration’s software development outsourcing Knowledge Base.


Selecting the right technological stack for your project and forming the right development strategy for the application is the key to your overall success. There are so many different abbreviations, so many approaches and so many technology languages and frameworks in the sphere of development at the moment, but which technology stack would suit your development project? Which programing technology to choose for the back-end and for the front-end?  Why development choosing one programming technology is more expensive than another? Why the hourly rate of developers differ from technology to technology, even from framework to framework of one the same technology language?technology stack for web development

To start with, let’s define what a “technological stack” is or how it is also called “tech stack” in development:

Technological stack of the project is the list of programming languages, frameworks and programming tools that your development team will choose in order to create the software. It is widely used to divide the technological stack of the project into 2 main tech components:

  • Front end, e.i client side
  • Back end, e.i. server side

In this article we will not only mention possible list of technologies and how they are divided into front-end programming languages and back-end programming languages, or front-end frameworks and back-end frameworks, but we will also share some basic tips which will help you in the beginning of your development and will help you to choose a technology stack for your web application development.

Web application development stack choice

TIP1

Choose technology stack which will suit not only current development needs, but pay attention to further cost of maintenance of your project

Keep in mind, selecting the technology stack for your project will affect not only current development of your web app, but also will impact the cost of your maintenance and development of additional functionality in the future.

TIP2

To avoid risks better not to choose too young technology

 Pay attention whether the selected technology or the selected framework are young, you should understand that a young technology, even booming on the market, means developers with little experience in it, meanwhile the hourly rate for those developers will always be higher. As well young frameworks don’t have large communities and might contain some vulnerabilities which would be fixed in new versions, however, this will require additional efforts of developers. So “classic” programming languages, like Java, JavaScript, PHP or any other proven technology stack will provide you with more stability.

TIP3

Choose appropriate hourly rate and confirm it for further development of your app

Pay attention to different hourly rate for different technologies, keep in mind not only necessity of current development, but additional functionality and maintenance as well. Developer’s hourly rate is not always formed according to the level of expertise of the developer. Market demand may impact as well. The hourly rate for the developer in the same development technology may vary from region to region as well.

TIP3

Choose open source technology, or be prepared to additional expenses

Pay attention to the technology tools you are going to use, as most of Java or PHP programs are free, while a great part of .NET tools are per charge and some of them are really expensive.

TIP4

“Technology season”

 Keep in mind that when you start your research, if you will do research on summer holidays, or Christmas holidays, or Easter, the prices for the developers might vary simply because of the fact that most of the developers are on holidays, and those who are not are overloaded and simply trying to earn. Hiring front end or back end developer for your project is preferably to be done in advance before the start of the project, as additional charges for urgency might be applied in this case as well.

TIP5

Expertise of the development team or your in-house developer is very important

 An important fact, that most of the functionality is possible to develop using any programming language, so pay attention to the expertise of your development team, if you already have one. Learning new framework can take much more time for them, then to implement the functionality according to the stack they are professional in. For example, it is easier and will require less time to use ReactJS on the front end of the project, which contains tabs, however, if you have a great Angular front end developer, or even a good JavaScript in-house developer, for sure learning React for both of them would be much more complicated and time-consuming than simply implementing required front end functionality using Angular or Javascript.

Technology stacks combinations

In this article we would like to provide you with some examples and combinations of technology stacks for web applications.

Let’s start with front end. The following combination is considered to be “classic”:

  • HTML, which will define the elements in the web browser
  • CSS to choose appropriate style for the layout
  • Javascript for the interactivity of the front end part

choose a technology stack for web application development

Also, developers usually choose bootstrap to build a web application.

At the moment there are 2 Javascript frameworks  and ReactJS  – a library of Javascript, which are widely in use to build the front end of the applications:

  • Angular
  • ReactJS
  • Vue.js

 best technology stack

Back-end has a great variety of programming languages and frameworks.  In this article we won’t go into details and will outline technology stacks that are in use in our company mostly.

Also, when we talk about back-end, it is not only about programming language, technology stack for the back-end is much wider than this. It usually includes:

  • Operating system. Today, Linux is one of the most popular for the web applications
  • Web server, for example Apache HTTP Server, NGINX, Apache Tomcat
  • Database, SQL or NoSQL
  • Programming language
  • Frameworks, which optimize the development in many areas for the developer, that’s why there are so many frameworks, used in multiple products development builds.

Best Database Software Of 2021: Benefits, Features, Pricing & More

Code Inspiration considers 3 back end development languages to be proven and stable to choose.

  • Java
  • PHP
  • Node.js

Here are some examples of proven combination to best stacks for web development.

technology stack for web applications

Classic stack using Java on the back end – pure Javascript and its frameworks on the front-end is always a good idea. LTS of Java will provide you with stability in maintenance in the further lifecycle of your app, Javascript frameworks have lots of tools and solutions to optimize work of your developers.

LAMP stack.

When your web application requires high performance, PHP as a programming language of this technology stack will suit well a dynamic website. Usually hourly rate of PHP developer would be lower than for Java expert or Node.js developer.

And to finish our article, we couldn’t but mention so popular and booming web stacks with Node.js as the programming language for the back end and React and Angular, Javascript frameworks, for the front end.

MEAN and MERN tech stacks

The only difference between these 2 technology stacks is that in MEAN stack Angular is used to build the front end, in MERN stack instead of Angular React is used for the development of the application.

Both technology stacks are considered to be reliable in order to choose them for the rapid font end development of the project.  Here the most important would be the expertise of your development team and the technology stack they will be more comfortable to work with developing your product. Both React and Angular include tools to develop a stable working build and product.

To sum up

In the conclusion we would like to outline. Selection of an appropriate technology stack is very important, don’t risk following modern tendencies on the technology market choosing young technology with little community, pay attention to the LTS of the development language selected, keep in mind hourly rate of the developer, and it is always better to choose an open source development stacks in order to reduce the budget for the development of the application.


The article is a part of Code Inspiration’s software development outsourcing Knowledge Base.