Hi everyone! I'm starting a personal project that I've been postponing for a little while and I need a bit of advice. I thought that it will be a bit of a challenge but I figure the best way to learn is by doing!
The plan is to build an app with loads of automation build in for reporting which would make it very easy to perform tasks, The plan is to build something similar to an HR app using microservice architecture, separating services e.g. employee data, payroll (including calculations based on easily entered info like tax %), employee services (vacation, sick day allowance booking and tabulation) and automated reporting on a pre-defined schedule (bi-weekly, monthly).
I am considering Django (as I currently know a bit of Python) and Symfony (as a friend who is a developer recommended it) but I am well aware there are other (and probably better) tools out there for the job (like maybe ExpressJS/Node.js for the backend and React/Vue.js for the front).
Background:
I have got knowledge as a DevOps, Site Reliability and Cloud engineer so once the app is built I'm very comfortable taking it to deployment.
Thank you all for your help and responses.
Hi. I guess it all depends on what your goal is. If you wanna make fast prototyping Django or ExpressJNodeJS might be really good candidates. You can write your services quickly and easily by using anyone of them. Maybe we can also put Laravel in the same category.
Symfony is also another application framework that comes with many reusable components. It provides great flexibility with the configuration and dependency management solutions. So that you can inject or override anything, anytime without doing something hack-ish. You don't have to depend on any components that come with the framework and, replace them with whatever you prefer unless encounter any integration issues. I can say that Laravel also provides most of the Symfony futures as it uses its components under the hood. However, my personal experience with Laravel was not so good because it made me feel like I use a modernized version of Codeigniter. But anyway. :) So if I have to choose one of them, I would choose Symfony.
From the backend perspective, all of those have some pros and cons. For example, If strict type declaration is important for you and you don't like code magics like monkey patching etc., maybe Python and NodeJS might not be good candidates and maybe you could choose Symfony/php. However, in this case, you'll be missed out on the most powerful future of NodeJS which is non-blocking io. if you plan to do IO-intensive works, I think it would be a big loss.
So, maybe I can recommend you to have a look at typescript + NestJS also. https://nestjs.com/ The futures that NestJS provides might be a good balance between the strengths of Symfony and NodeJS.
As I'm backend dev., I haven't work too many frontend projects but from my personal experience, I loved ReactJS more than Vue although Vue was simpler. Maybe a front-end developer can give us more helpful details about those.
Hope it helps.
If your considering a microservice architecture, depending on the hosting environment, i would also look at flask and python for simple apis and event handling using the likes of AWS lambda for simple functions. Using something like the severless framework can simplify the deployment of these services.
Thank you very much for your reply. I will look into this!
Thank you very much for your comprehensive reply. This is really helpful.
