I'll preface this by saying I haven't ever done work on the Microsoft stack, so take this with a grain of salt.

Community support: Java tends to have a more active community (and much more diverse universe of new open source projects) than .Net (related to below).

Difficulty level: I'd say the Java/Spring stack is more difficult because Java developers tend to use more community projects and have to know which ones to choose in which circumstances (e.g. what logging framework to use? What database connection pooling library to use? What testing framework to use). That being said, most decisions you have to make have choices that are vastly more popular than others. My impression is that .NET guys use stuff from the standard library almost exclusively. If it's not provided there, it's a problem they never thought to solve or maybe write their own (usually the former).

Career prospects: I'll get hate for this probably, but Java/Spring has more jobs than .Net. .NET Core even more so because it's new. Most .NET jobs out there are going to be not Core, and not on anything other than Windows. LinkedIn search for jobs in United States shows 97,103 for Java and 36,448 for C#. That's not to say some individual city might not have more .NET than Java, but by and large Java is bigger. Also, .NET is not dying at the same pace as say Ruby on Rails (sorry Rails fans). I'd say it's ticking very slowly lower, maybe even holding steady. I wouldn't say you're screwed career-wise if you choose .NET. C# is also pretty similar to Java from what I've seen, and I know professionals that have transitioned to Java (though interestingly, I don't know any that did the reverse). Several companies have basically no .NET footprint, for example, Amazon, Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter all have Java, but basically no C#.

Specialized fields: Neither Spring or .Net are going to be a thing in a field like data science. That's exclusively Python (some R) for the most part. The only exception being that there is some Java in Hadoop, and Scala in Spark (which runs on the JVM). But I think those are generally more for data products being created, and not data science work. I'm also under the impression this is increasingly less the case than historically. Some other specialties might make Java useful, for example Android development.

In short, Java is the COBOL of the modern enterprise (which is both a good and bad thing). I recommend it to anyone over .NET, but not for technical reasons. It's for reasons related to the questions you asked. There are actually reasons I think CLR and C# are actually better from a technical perspective than Java (unsurprisingly, since they had the benefit of hindsight). But that's not what you were asking about...

Spring boot helps you creating microservices in hours, not days and there is a very active community around it with amazing integrations. Check one of the tutorials maybe. At least here in Germany, the job market will be better for Spring Boot as well, there are a lot more companies using Java then C#.

ASP.NET Core is pretty new while spring boot is very old but with a different name. Spring boot is just a pack of spring packages which make your life easier. I also believe that java community is way stronger than c# community... You can do your job in both frameworks and it's up to you what you choose after-all you're going to work on the project/lead it ... but whatever you choose.. after a few days of investment stick with your decision because in both frameworks you'll encounter challenges :)

I’ll echo what others have said here with a few twists.

I have experience with both platforms including Micronaut, a relatively new kid on the block. It all depends on your near term goal. If it is to make money, sure Java jobs pay more generally because there is more hassles when dealing with the entire ecosystem. Like someone said earlier, you have to make a decision at almost every stage of the development cycle from the IDE, dependency resolution framework, logging, serialization, microservice framework etc. There is just too much choice which some may argue is an advantage while others may argue is a distraction and productivity killer. At the end of the day you can build solid systems with both frameworks.

Coming to ASP Core, yes I also agree that options are more streamlined. You’ll be using Visual Studio or Visual Studio code. For dependency management, you’ll be using Nuget. But I disagree with one of the comments above about the lack of choice. In some aspects .NET actually has more choice believe it or not for example choice of ORM. There is entity framework, nhibernate, dapper etc. For J2ee, hibernate reigns supreme although you have JPA. For dependency injection you have many IoC containers like unity, castle Windsor in .NET while you have Guice and maybe a Spring based implementation.

Also C# is technically a better language that Java. That’s not questionable as has also been stated above. Many things are done right obviously by avoiding some of the mistakes made in the underlying architecture surrounding the Java programming language. That’s why Microsoft created c# to begin with. The language is a lot cleaner and allows you to focus on learning core principles and nail down fundamental OO with emphasis on good design. I find too many distractions in the Java ecosystem which takes me away from understanding the core problem I am trying to solve.

So as you can this is not an easy decision and as someone has stated there’s work to do regardless of what technology choice you make.

If your sole purpose is to make a higher base salary, sure pick Spring Boot. If you want to quickly deliver something and iterate, pick ASP Core. I personally use c# for all private projects and proving concepts even though my employer is a Java shop. It allows me to stay focused on solving the problem and not constantly wrestle with issues such as Gradle dependency resolution glitches in IntelliJ.

Given that you can transfer skills from .NET to J2ee I recommend guys to pick up ASP get a couple of services to get a feel web development as you can still get jobs in Java even with that experience. Companies don’t care these days. In fact a lot of companies are going to Go so there’s that too.

Depends on your immediate term goal.

I suggest you to go with MERN Stack (Mongo,express,react,Node). As you know python and django which is a plus point because you can use python and node as your backend and for front-end use react(easy to learn) and database of your choice.(Mongo or SQL)

GO For MERN Stack... brother

Having worked with many J2EE database applications in the past, I now turn to Django if I can and the project allows it as it is so quick to get up and running. It has a logical workflow and organized structure and it comes with a high level of security (if you import the appropriate backends). If you are wanting to incorporate python-based data processing (or cython), it is relatively easy to write a backend plugin. I have found it more stable with updates than other frameworks (particularly compared to the NPM world such as React which so often descends into dependency hell when a version of something is updated). One hassle worth mentioning is the database migrations support which can sometimes mess up during development but there are workarounds. With a React frontend, you would be using the Django REST Framework (https://www.django-rest-framework.org/) so you may find that you have to overwrite a lot of the methods here as the defaults are fairly basic CRUD operations which don't really support nested relationships very well. I don't have any experience with .Net so I can't give a comparison except of course, the obvious one, portability, as Python is platform-independent. PS, I would recommend Vue over React also for a well organized front-end.

You can get done what you want with just about any modern framework and language.

Django is fast and easy to learn but as your website grows you will need more and more community apps whose release cycles do not keep up with Django. Unless you are willing to work on the community apps, Django may not be for you.

Compare the active community sizes of Django apps to Ruby on Rails apps and you'll see very active communities with Ruby on Rails and small Django communities. Don't switch to Ruby on Rails though--it is a small, dying community of enthusiasts.

ASP.NET Core is a great backend framework, the community is large and you can always find answers; however, according to the StackOverflow developer survey, it is not desirable for the majority of programmers. I still use it though because my background evolved from C to C++ and then to C#. I also like the Microsoft world.

I've programmed a lot using Angular and some React but am switching to Vue.js which is much easier to learn and faster to code in. Be sure to use TypeScript with Vue.js. Just watch the video on the Vue home page to see how fast he can code using Vue.

But do you really want to code a website from scratch? If not, try WordPress Elementor. It may save you tons of time.

For mobile, use Google Flutter. In my 35 years of professional programming I've never seen anything more elegant, easy to learn, well documented and beautiful than Flutter. From one a single base you can target both Android and IOS and soon Web. You can also develop in Android Studio which means your screen real estate requirements are small so you don't need two monitors.

I find myself in the opposite boat, I have made commercial websites with Django and now find myself learning ASP.NET. My recommendation comes with the following caveats... regardless of direction the learning will happen. Django is a very battery included framework, so the initial process will be painless, I found that documentation and support for more advanced use cases to be fairly easy to get support.

I personally found Django pretty nice to work with.

Go with the ASP.NET Core. It is a very mature technology now and there are tons of documentation, tutorials and support you can find online. Also ASP.NET Core Web API plays quite well with the React. It is easy to implement the entire back-end in .NET Core (APIs, authentication, database access layer...) and if you need any third party package, I'm pretty sure you will find and implement in a form of a NuGet package. Who knows, maybe one day you'll need to create a mobile app and with a fully functional Web API, it would be more-less easy task to build a mobile app on top of it.

I recommend you use a framework such as Firebase instead of implementing your own backend server for the website.

I found that Firebase enables me to build websites more quickly since it takes care of the backend for me so most of my development time is building the front-end (using React in your case).

If you're going to learn Python anyway, Django project will boost your learning process. Since you're going to use React , you only neet to create REST API. Basic API can be created with Django rather easy.

You are probably referring to ruby on rails for web development and nodejs for building the backend. Nodejs has frameworks such as express and next which not only provides a minimal code to build a backend but also gives the flexibility to try and experiment with the framework choices. For example you can have express framework + Passport for OAuth .... etc. The flexibility and the constant improvement of the language provides a good reason to opt for nodejs. Nodejs uses javascript which makes your code uniform when you are working full stack i.e react in front end and nodejs in backend.

I'd use the following metaphor to non-technical people. Rails is like a prepackaged toolkit, which can get most of the common tasks done fairly with ease. Whereas, node.js with whatever backend framekwork of choice, is like a DIY toolkit assembled by mix-and-match different tools in a large tool shop. Of course, at times DIY toolkit can do better on specific tasks. Given that you are the only dev on the project, I'd assume that the resource is fairly limited. And looks like you are not building some next-gen super duper fast smart application. So Just go with the prepackaged toolkit then. Rails is a very opinionated framework, there're pros and cons to it. But thanks to that, many of the gems are coded with it in mind. For example, they are all designed with same naming convention. Many will work well together out-of-box, for example devise and cancancan. Besides, many stuff are built in the framework. For example, logging utility, csrf protection, session encryption, etc. Yes, many of those stuff may not be useful or necessary at the beginning of the project life-cycle. However, down the road, there is a good chance you will need some of those. And the moment you realize that you already have it, it's so delightful. In addition, it's usually easier to debug a rails app than a node app in my experience. Personally, the cases where I would pick node.js over rails would be projects either require a) high-performance, or b) certain core functionality that has been implemented by some node packages but not by any ruby gems. In term of performance, node has a clear advantage over any other major web frameworks, except the ones built with go. It's simply a language feature. Node allows developer to easily write code that runs db query, external api calls, or other stuff of that nature in parallel. And that is THE MOST COMMON performance bottleneck of web applications.

Rails is currently a very mature and feature complete framework.

It's the ideal one if you're the only dev for your project because you get so many things already baked-in the framework that you'd only need to deeply care about specific stuff.

I won't say any NodeJS framework isn't good enough but in my experience with NodeJS frameworks you have to code a lot of the things Rails already provides. There's many people in Twitter and IRL asking for a "Rails for JavaScript" framework.

And you know? In the early stages of any project we have to validate it first with real users/customers. With Rails you can get to production real quick and fast.

I'm going to mention some of the features you get from day 1 when you run rails new app_name:

• File uploading with Active Storage
• Rich text editor with Action Text
• Emailing with Action Mailer
• ORM, migrations, validations with Active Record
• Web sockets with Action Cable
• Internationalization
• Modern frontend stuff with Webpacker

and more.

The JavaScript community is on its moment, growing and gathering more people everyday but the Rails community is also a big one and there's always going to be a Rails developer to hire whenever you're ready to hire someone.

I suggest you to go with Rails because is a good choice, gives you less things to worry about and it's a very good and mature framework.

I hate to admit it, because I loved my time with Rails (and I still love the framework), I have a hard time justifying new Rails applications these days. Core team has made some tragic design decisions, and developers just don't perceive it as being "cool" any more. The latter is a terrible metric for which to base a technology decision, but I think you'll find it more difficult to recruit additional engineers if you choose Ruby on Rails.

Without knowing too much of the details, Node/Express (ideally with Typescript) seems like a better solution here, given you'll be building out the front-end in Vue or React. It might be worth looking at NestJS, as it's the closest I've seen to a well-formed opinionated framework on the Node side of things. We're also fans of Objection ORM.

I hope that's helpful!

I need a solid argument to explain to people that aren't necessarily tech-savvy as to why we should choose Rails over Nodejs

Hi Max, it sounds like that you are proficient in both stacks and probably have a higher expertise in Rails (correct me if I am wrong) and since you are the only dev on a project, a good argument that comes to mind is probably the velocity and maturity (enterprise grade, battle tested in production) that Rails provide with proven success stories in the tech industry such as Airbnb, Stripes, Shopify to name a few. You can also make the argument that Rails is great to run the backend and React+Vue (and nodejs for tooling) is ideal for the front-end development (see or find companies example that use both). You can also build and show a prototype using both and share your experience which could help you find and forge the selling points to those non tech savvy folks, why not.

Eventually, are you going to have other developers on your project? if yes then you will need to take in account, onboarding and ramp up to contribution time when they are hired.

IMHO, I am not a fan of the debate Rails vs Nodejs, they are just tools at the disposal of the developer it's just a matter of figuring out what makes the most sense.

Let me know if you wanna discuss further, happy to help out!

ps: markdown preview on stack share... no good.

Rails has advantages over node.js (specifically express) when working a more complicated backend. While Express has some speed advantages to Rails, this is mitigated if your software is more CPU intensive.

If you are currently not working my first suggestion is to study both the frameworks and get a good grasp of those. If you didn't get confident with Django in the first place you should reconsider going back and study more. Get a video course with some code-along and produce some simple application you can showcase on your interviews. If you already took a course take a different one. Another trainer could be more effective and you could experience something new with different excercises. There are lots of both free and paid courses out there. When you will get confident with Django get your feet wet with Node.js because it surely worth it. Node is very different from Django from some perspective, it looks more like an asynchronous version of Flask to me. Be sure to have a good knowledge of ES6 first, because it will be really useful to understand the Node best practices. Study as much as you can now if you are not working. It will supercharge you for the future...

From my experience of the early startup world, a majority of companies these days use Node.js. Python and Go are the next biggest languages, but significantly smaller than Node.

However, if you're having trouble with the front end aspect of Django, using Node probably won't make that easier for you. You'll have a lot more options between front end frameworks (React, Vue.js, Angular 2) , but they'll definitely take more time to learn than Django's templating system.

Think about whether you want to focus on front end or back end for now, and make a decision from there.

I had the same question myself a few months ago. I finally chose Node.js, and it was one of the best options I did back then. From when I started programming, I always believed that Python was for me the best language, secure and stable. However, it is not flexible for web development, there are more packages & libraries that are built and work only with JavaScript / TypeScript, and the community, resources & support is much bigger. I was also fascinated by the Django ORM, which I still am, & the admin interface. But those are things, that can be replaces by other tools, such as TypeORM, and the admin interface was not needed at all finally for my case. I know understand that Python is not the language that I should use everywhere and every time, but I can say that it is really good for algorithms, computer science, maths, statistics, analytics & AI. To be honest, I chose TypeScript (TS) with Node.js & Express, because it has auto-completion and "strict" code checking. I hope this helps you, and let you take a look at various aspects of choosing a programming language to work with.

Jinja is a template rendering engine and you will encounter some sort of template rendering engine in each language. Jinja is a pretty standard tool and almost every language has some sort of Jinja equivalent. Ruby has Liquid, Node has Nunjucks, Java has Jinjava, Go's default templating engine is easy to pick up if you know Jinja, Helm charts are easier to pick if know Jinja . So learning Jinja is a good thing.

I would suggest to go with js, it's the craze now when you enter into the stack it has variety of options and tools that you can adopt , and more than that the demand for js engineers is exponentially increasing and js can do magic in any type of application or architecture.

Actually, you could get very good solution with implementing BE and admin panel with Django and FE with React.js or Vue.js. it will provide you a pretty flexible and powerful environment.

If you already know some django stuff you should keep that learning path. And for the job if you really want an internship you should learn to make rest APIs using django or nodejs, and a front end that consumes those APIs using some framework

I highly recommend NestJS because:

• It's a framework you already like;
• Typescript is growing fast, being increasingly adopted in the community;
• All layers are well defined, not needing to think much about the organization;
• Great documentation;
• Nest CLI increases the development speed and keep the pattern;

Only using express and knowing that project can grow, you'ill need to define the structure well so that it doesn't get out of control.

Hi Louai,

I am quite sure that you know the answer to your problem. And I am here to help you to follow your arrow. I have worked with the most popular Nodejs frameworks and I can sure you that there's no stack better than NestJS (at all). Typescript is the best thing that happened with Javascript, this is a fact. Ans NestJS make a such wonderful job using all the best Typescript tools. NestJS is the most mature and organized API manager. Its modular dependence injection, the use of DDD, the solid idea of single responsibility, it's unit a and e2e testing support, its documentation is the most incredible work in the world of Nodejs. You won't regret choosing this framework, even if your application grows a lot. If you follow the documentation tips you will be able to create an amazing and organized application.

ps: I am not part of the NestJS team, I am just a guy tired of wasting time with dumb and bad Frameworks and its bad documentations. I find relief in NestJS with all the time it's saved to me, it helped me to improve my job and let me create great things with Nodejs.

Hi, I'm in a similar position, but related to personal projects. After falling in love with few frameworks in the first day and rejecting them in day 2, I started learning nestJS last week. I currently develop personal side projects using cakephp, and I intend to migrate to nest + vue. This week I'm taking a nestJS course in order to be sure that this is what I want by praticing a little. If you didn't do it yet, I suggest you try to code a todo app or a similar example API using nest, so you can "feel" if this is indeed what you want to use in this larger-scale project.

Some of the characteristics that got my attention to nestJS are typescript, a lot of annotations/decorations, an oppinionated approach to organizing the project, nice documentation and discord, and it's evolution at npm trends shows me it's probably not going to vanish or get buggy anytime soon.

I would definitely suggest NestJs over other options because NestJs gives a lot of tooling. it would definitely suggest NestJs over other options because NestJs gives a lot of tooling & it gives a lot of functionality out of the box. If your team worked with angular 2+ then it will really easy to learn.

First of all, my experience using either Node.js with Express or NestJS is not wide. I liked NestJS due to it's similarity to Angular, so when you know Angluar and like TypeScript you are going to love NestJS, it will be instantly very familiar and easy to use, it's adds a good structure to the project out of the box and well, it uses TypeScript, which is a more structured language - it's good for scalability. As for performance concern s - NestJS is based on Node, it just brings Angular's modular structure to it, so the question is more about how is the additional layer influences the performance - I cannot answer that.

Have you checked out Hapi as an alternative? I'ts not Typescript by default though. If that doesn't seem too interesting, it sounds like you want to go with NestJS :)

It's probably worth investing some time for your team to learn Node.js. There's very little overhead, especially with a framework like ExpressJS, so if your team is familiar with JavaScript it should be a quick process.

It handles I/O really well out of the box, and has a strong community with great open source libraries. Since you're using React on the front end, there's also some benefit to being able to use JavaScript throughout your stack.

Go with Node.js. There's something really satisfying about being able to use a single language across your entire tech stack. Especially once you integrate GraphQL, which is effectively JSON.

Your second best option is Go, but the ecosystem around Node.js is quite a bit stronger. This will play a big factor when you start building functionality like file management, messaging (especially in real-time), and authentication. The libraries and documentation are just stronger for Node.

We recommend Laravel over Ruby on Rails (Ruby) and Express.js (JavaScript/Node.js). We chose Laravel ourselves for our own internal software project, recently after comparing these same 3 software frameworks. In selecting Laravel, we chose to build our app using the software language PHP. PHP has the largest market share of all the web-based software languages (close to 80% of all websites use PHP). Also, Laravel is the fastest-growing software framework based on PHP making it a wise choice.

We also plan to integrate WordPress and WooCommerce later with our Laravel web-app. WordPress and WooCommerce like Laravel are all built using PHP. WordPress is the most popular Content Management System in the world. This will allow us to build out the front-end marketing website in WordPress. Also, we plan to offer subscriptions and sell products. For this, we will use WooCommerce. WooCommerce is the most used e-commerce platform in the world. We’ll be able to use our same Laravel developers to extend our app to WordPress and WooCommerce. By standardizing on PHP, we’ll be able to use the same software developers on all 3 platforms. PHP’s large market share will be an asset to us as we start recruiting talented software developers.

Lastly, we are gaining access to a fast-growing and awesome community that supports Laravel. Before we made our decision, I personally met Laravel’s founder Taylor Otwell along with several of his team members. After meeting with the Laravel team at Laracon US in New York City and learning more about the direction they are going with the framework, we’re confident we made the right decision.

To read the longer version of this answer where we go into more detail behind our recommendation, visit https://rackless.com/laravel-rails-expressjs

Before I recommend a tool, I think it is important to look at your requirements and capabilities - as you have looked at 3 very different tools: different programming languages, different implementation strategies and different target audience. It sounds like you don't already have a set of dedicated developers, so it is likely that your choice should be mainly driven by how easy it is to get developers that are familiar with the tools - so I'm going to list some considerations that I think you should review, starting with what I believe would be the most important for your bootstrap process:

1. Mindshare: how easy it is to get developers that are familiar with the technology and can immediately start working on your project. This is definitely where Node.js shines - Javascript is one of the fastest growing languages and Node.js played a huge part in this. I would bet that wherever you are located, Javascript developers would be the easiest to come by.

2. Fit for purpose: from your description we can understand that you are looking at a backend technology to implement some sort of REST API for a mobile app. The 3 different options you offered each fit on a different place on such a stack: Ruby is a programming language and not even a service framework - if you choose it, you then have to choose a server implementation and REST framework (and there are a lot, mostly as Ruby has a standard API for connecting a web server and application frameworks, and so this space has blown up) it used to be that Rails was the most popular, so you may choose that, but the interest in it has waned a bit in recent years; Node.js is a server framework, but it also has a dominant application framework called Express, that is geared well to your usage, so you'd likely work with that; Laravel is an application framework - it uses the PHP programming language, whose use has declined a bit in recent years, and was originally built for MVC type applications - though it has workflows for REST APIs and would probably work well for you as well.

3. Scalability: while this is probably the least significant issue at the moment (when it gets to a point where the backend service is your bottleneck, you'd likely have enough resources for a rewrite), and also the most dependent on factors that you didn't specify and are hard to estimate (such as: session complexity; amounts of data; sensitivity to locality; sensitivity to latency), it is still worthy to address it. Unfortunately, I don't have any good news: Ruby is notoriously bad at getting the best performance (the current BKM for milking performance from a Ruby codebase is to run the app on the Java virtual machine); Node.js has severe memory limitations that will make it very hard to scale if your backend needs to do a lot of work (I have a very personal and troubling experience with this issue); and PHP has as many scalability optimization strategies as there are PHP developers (this is not a good thing).

My suggestion to you as to how to proceed can be summarized to this prioritized list of options: 1. Get a good head developer with a lot of experience and let them choose the best tool - they'd likely go with what they know, which is likely to be a good choice - and if not, when scalability will become an issue, you could rewrite. 2. Choose something (likely Node.js) and don't worry about scalability - see (1) above. 3. Use Vert.x: it is a highly scalable application and service framework that offers great performance as well as a lot of tools to solve data scalability, locality and latency, and it works with multiple programming languages, such as Javascript and Ruby.

Node.js would be the best choice among all, you can compare all 3 of them on Stackshare and you will find that Node.js is on the top on almost every aspect, and since your focus is primarily on Performance and Scalability you won't regret after choosing Node.js. Also, the JavaScript open-source community has made a lot of effort and created numerous packages that will give you the speed and smooth execution of your project you need. Though your question was regarding backend, but if you choose JavaScript(Node.js) at your backend, then you can have a cross-functional team that can work on both, frontend as well as backend because JavaScript is everywhere, React Native for Android and iOS apps, React.js for single page web apps and Node.js ofcourse for your backend. And I don't have to tell you how much easier it would be to code and manage in a single language to build your complete system end-to-end. I hope it helps.

That's a really ambitious project. So you're going to want to move as quickly as possible. That means choosing a software stack that will allow you to move the most quickly. Of the ones you've listed, Ruby (Ruby on Rails, more precisely) will give you that. There are probably other options that would allow you to move even more quickly than Rails, but developers for those more advanced stacks are much more expensive, and hard to find.

Rails can and does scale to millions of users. It's not necessarily easy, but if you're running a successful app, you'll be able to afford people to help you scale out when you reach that point. But if you choose a slower framework (or have bad developers) you won't even reach the point of needing scalability.

you can achieve what you want with both. but for me, the obvious choice is Aspnet core. the main reason is being the easiness of writing code in a multi-threading manner & ORM. the Django ORM is ugly as hell that I don't even want to look into its code. I did a couple of projects with Django and I wish I never did it. the amount of nuances was so much that after we delivered the projects I rejected any new Django project. I know people still using that and getting projects done but it's not a clever choice when there are easier choices out there.

moreover, after the latest upgrade, the Aspnet core 3 is the fastest and best of framework in 2020.

I always use Django on my projects. It is really easy and friendly fro the developer. It also comes with an inbuilt admin panel where you can manage all your models (tables), Django has a great authentication and authorization system, and it provides a great and powerful URL dispatcher, suitable for your needs. Furthermore, you can use a called django-pyodbc that is coded specifically for Microsoft SQL Server, and the SQL dialects for SQL Server ("T-SQL") and Access ("Access SQL"). However, I would not recommend using an Access DataBase with any web application's backend. Of course, it depends if you explicitly have Microsoft as your main tech stack.

Hope I helped you, and good luck with your project!

Would recommend Asp.net core with angular, It would integrate fine. I have experienced Django its good for fast, short span projects. But when it comes to speed, maintainability Asp .net is a winner. Though you can use angular/react in both frameworks. Your application consists of crud operations so you can have a choice based upon availability of resource, maintenance and time

Short answer, ASP.NET because of #2. I think the Microsoft stack, now and in the future will be easier to sync with Microsoft Access. I haven't done extensive research but usually Microsoft office apps work well with the MSFT stack. BUT I personally prefer Django.