Hi. I am a backend developer in a company tasked with recoding a legacy application, choosing the right technology stack, and then later hiring for that stack.
This is a freight/logistics application made 15 years ago in PHP with no modern framework used. In this application, customers from different countries login into theirs accounts and add a huge number of shipments, like let's say 500, and then, later on, generate PDFs for them after calling third-party APIs. This application has API integrations with lots of other companies and also offers API access to its own software as well. This application is also used in-house by warehouse people to scan different shipments using barcode scanners and to process shipments by performing different actions on them. The database being used currently is MySQL.
Now we have the choice to write this application in a modern technology stack. Performance, speed, reliability, and security are the primary concerns here.
Should I go with Java/Spring Boot with AngularJS as the front end or PHP/Laravel with Vue.js as the front end?
Switching at this point from PHP to Java will not be hard if Java is considered better here because we can hire as per our final decision.
Thanks.
Hi Chris, I will suggest going with Laravel and MySQL since the existing system is already in PHP it will help a lot and easier to port out to Laravel and will save a lot of time. Laravel has a very robust mechanism to handle the jobs/Queues and it comes with a lot of features.
Thank you. Keeping aside the fact that the existing system is made in PHP, would you still recommend Laravel over java? Wont java give better performance and speed over Laravel?
Hi Chris, I recommend you to use Java with spring boot to rewrite your software. You will have the advantages of modern applications. The main challenge will be to cut your existing business logic to functional services (microservices) that will communicate each others. That will comes up also with the challenges of orchestrate those services but for that no worries. For the database also, will recommend Postgre too. For the front end, you can use angular, react or vue js with your backend since it will be API calls.
Hope it can help!
