Do you have a unique app idea in mind?
There is no doubt that the technology stack of your app is an important thing to consider, But what is a technology stack?
Technology stack is a set of services used for making application software. It is a factor that influences its ability to scale, speed, and development timeline. The major social network Facebook is composed of different programming frameworks and languages, including JavaScript, HTML, CSS, PHP, React, MySQL, and we can say it as a technology stack of Facebook.
In this article, we will be focusing on Web and Mobile application technology stacks.
Web Application Tech Stack
A web application is a computer program that has client and server where the client runs in a web browser. The web browser handles the user interface and client-specific controls. For example, online e-commerce, banking, and emailing applications are web applications.
Client-Side
In a web application, the client-side is handled by a web browser (example Google Chrome, Firefox). For defining web browser uses HTML(HyperText Markup Language) and CSS(Cascading Style Sheets). HTML is used for determining the type of content where CSS is used for styling the content. Bootstrap is a popular framework for building UI.
When you need to add interactivity and make the web application dynamic JavaScript language is used. With the help of JavaScript libraries like jQuery, React, and frameworks like Angular, Backbone, or Ember web can build fully maintainable and quality web application clients.
Server Side
For every web application, we need to add custom business logic, and for that, we need a server-side programming language, a programming language makes a web application complete. This is an invisible part of users and most of the challenges are faced when choosing a server-side programming language. Same as client-side programming, there are different frameworks provided by different programming languages.
- Scala (Play)
- Java (Spring)
- Ruby (Ruby on Rails)
- PHP (Laravel)
- JavaScript (ExpressJS with Nodejs runtime)
- Clojure (Luminus)
We need database systems to store our user data, and there are mainly relational and non-relational database systems. Most common database systems are
- MySQL(relational)
- PostgreSQL(relational)
- MongoDB (non-relational)
Another part of the server-side system is a server that handles the request, the commonly used web servers are:
- Apache
- Nginx
The most popular web application tech stacks are MEAN stack (MongoDB, ExpressJS, AngularJS, and NodeJS or Nginx) and LAMP stack( Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP).
Mobile Application Tech Stack
There are lots of technology choices for building mobile applications. Most used options are Native, React Native or PWA (Progressive Web Application) and targeted platforms are Android and iOS.
Native platform
When you need incomparable performance and want to use the native capability of the mobile devices then the best choice would be going for Native Solutions. For building an Android application supported programming languages are Kotlin and Java, for iOS applications, it is Swift and Objective C. But in development cost, developing in Native Platform solutions are more costly than other alternatives.
Cross-Platform
React Native and Flutter are the most popular cross-platform mobile application development stack. React Native uses Javascript programming language where Flutter uses Dart programming language. Developing in a cross-platform cut both costs and development time.
Check: Do you know which stack is right for your start-up?
5 Ways To Choose The Right Stack For Your Web or App
As we discussed so far, we have lots of options when it comes to choosing the right tech stack for your product idea. We can break down the thinking process to several factors.
1. Expertise and Knowledge of your Team
For your project deadline and code quality is an important factor and expertise of your development team is so very important. So when you choose a web tech stack having a good developer community and documentation makes your team easy to catch up with things. We can make use of developer communities including Github and Stackoverflow to understand the strength of the developer community.
Another development factor is testing support. Methodologies like Test-Driven Development (TDD) forces you to choose better frameworks, technologies that are easy to make testing codes which assure project quality.
2. Cost of Development
Most of the programming frameworks are free and opensource, but that might not be the case always, it is essential to calculate your budget on app development project; you have to pay the salaries of the developers, infrastructure, etc. So you must opt for open source technologies if possible.
3. Maintainability
If your software architecture has better portability, reusability, and scalability, it influences component configurations. If the product code is too complicated, debugging it accurately will become an issue. So when you choose a tech stack, consider its maintainability and reusability.
4. How much time you have?
When you have planned for your product launch, completing the product on time is a challenge. So that also acts as a factor when choosing a tech stack. If the selected tech stack needs more development time and testing, the chances of releasing the product on time are very low.
5. How big is your project?
If you are a non-tech founder, you might not be able to figure out whether your project is big or small.
Let’s breakdown different types of projects considering the size,
- Small Size projects are commonly prototype level projects that can be done in a short time, we can develop these projects by using existing rapid application frameworks or technologies like WordPress.
- Medium size projects would need programming language frameworks that have integrations across multiple platforms. These types of projects mainly come under e-commerce, financial industry category. Java, C#, and PHP are the most used programming languages.
- Big or Complex projects have more than one function and will need different programming languages and various web technologies. Projects like social networks, e-commerce marketplaces come under this category.
Conclusion
Always make the best choice that works for your business. The technology stack decision depends on your business goals, resources, and requirements. You need to get realistic and understand the pros and cons of the tech stack, even if it seems a time-proven technology.
So, do you really have an app idea? Please share your idea with us. We have a dedicated service platform for web and mobile applications, IoT and start-up consulting to build your idea.
