First thoughts: * As a beginner you need to understand concepts first, all languages out there are great, each has it's own philosophy, each is better suited for a specific situation. Learn concepts first, do something, then you will understand the differences between them and why one should be chose over another for a task * As a project manager you want your project to come to an end. You will get lost in all the different solutions out there (and it's good), but don't get lost too far. Very often I see people getting lost in those debates and never achieving things, like someone writing a book that would still be choosing the font 6 months after (we've all done that it's ok, but we have to realise it)

Chances are your project can be equally good on any different stacks. I heard an interview of someone from Uber who said something like they started with python, went to node, went back to python and went to go, and with micro-services now they can have all of them all-together.

Last remark: from what I know Laravel is a framework for PHP, so it IS PHP. Just like Symphony for PHP, Express for Node.js, Koa for Node.js, Flask for Python ...

Now to answer your question :

• PHP has a big community, it is great and easy to start with, and you will definitely will learn real object oriented structure
• Node.js has a big community too, don't worry finding help will be as easy. It is less easy to start with but in my point of view it is a lot easier to keep on going with it on a long run. Why ? Because it's very easy to run a new project, and it executes javascript. How is it good ? Because chances are that your front will also be using javascript (React.js / View.js are crazy good). Thanks to that you will be able to master the language better because you will use it all day (and at first mastering one language is more valuable than barely knowing two) and you won't have to switch languages in your head when you code. And communication between front and back will be in json ... Which is crazy close to javascript.

Alexander is right, if you go with PHP take your time first to do things by yourself like building your own MVC, the benefit is huge and the risk is to never really be able to understand what's happening on a deeper level. (at some point you can switch to a framework though). He's also right on choosing a strongly typed language, problem is javascript is not. This is why, if you choose node, when you start being confident, add typesccript.

Hope it helps, good luck

Short answer, if it's a web project (and I guess it is) go with PHP and you can integrate NodeJs services later.

@adzaria (Ezra Fayet) gave a great answer and I'd like to emphasize the first part: As a beginner you need to understand concepts first. For me that means to understand the web, how servers and requests work, APIs and few others.

Now, I'd like to add few things so, this is the long answer:

Why PHP?

• Everyone knows about the community - PHP is way older so you will find lots of resources and I am not only talking about learning - also lots of helpful tools and packages
• PHP is great for OOP - not perfect, but with PHP7 got great - and if you are a beginner you want to know good OOP for your future. Let's say JavaScript's OOP is a bit strange; I will not get into details but, let's say "it's not by the book". You can still learn JavaScript for your front-end

Why not Python? Python got popular because of AI - don't use PHP for AI and don't use Python for web applications. I can elaborate a lot here but I guess you get the point.

Why not NodeJs?

• NodeJs got popular because of sockets - and it works great, but as a service
• Try to find a good and affordable hosting for NodeJs. How about for Python?
• I would not ignore the security issues that it had and could appear. PHP is older and, therefore, wiser :)

Now, about a framework... is this a learning project or something that you need to do fast? My advice is to start a small project and not use any framework. However, you can use packages and inspire from a framework's architecture - Laravel is a good role model.

Why not start a big project? You will get distracted, get into details and product design stuff and get scared or border and abandon it. For your project you need an MVP - list of minimum required features that you put on paper - that you will complete. After that you can improve.

Good luck!

you can choose Node.js Here are my points

Node.js is build over chrome’s v8 and its works on non blocking io. Node.js have huge community and great packages (npm) to help you out in most cases and makes development faster Node.js has been adopted by many multi dollar company Hope this helps😊

I have used Laravel, but with Django you can develop faster, as authentication and admin panel are configured out of the box. It users SQLite by default and you won't have to worry about the database in the begginning

You cannot choose between Python | PHP | NodeJS Since they are entirely for Different purpose.

In Bird view

Python - Large Scale Projects and if you want a job in big IT company.

Node.JS - Huge computing projects and if you want job in Silicon valley startup.

PHP - Cost Effective and If you want start a business in near future.

Python, PHP and Node.js all are capable of being used to create good complex software. There are many examples of similar applications built on all of them. If I have to pick one, I would say consider Python and Django. It is fairly easy to develop web applications on top of this stack. Scaling and maintaining the application should also not be a problem given a lot of resources are available online.

The reason why i chose PHP is the amount of content you can find on the internet easily. As you quoted being a beginner, i think a more mature language would be better. And that's also another reason for following with PHP.

Python is simple and "mature", but it can be a bit hard to understand if you are a beginner. Python relies on heavy abstraction, and that's the reason behind it's simplicity. Python is an "easy to play, hard to master" language, i never recommend it to beginners. Also, one [maybe personal] reason why i don't like to use Python as back-end is: Python is very data-focused. So if your app has focus on business logic, Python wouldn't fit very well. And with that becomes an advantage, if your app has statistical focus, being data-focused or something like that, Python has huge advantage among all other languages due to many great tools the community has built.

About Node, it's like PHP, but less mature. It's as easy as PHP to find tools that can help you, for example, to abstract the database-connection's logic. But to find architectural-focused content, more advanced concepts, it's a lot harder. While that, Laravel's community, for example, has a lot of materials that involves those concepts.

Still, if you are really a beginner, i don't recommend using Laravel with PHP. Do things on plain PHP first, understand the reason behind using frameworks and Laravel's motivation.

Also, consider a strong-typed language first, those are considered more didatic, but less flexible.

Hi Eva, As you have solid experience with Spring already, you should jump into freelancing with that. It would be quite stressful to start freelancing with a tech stack you don't know well. Then in the background you can keep learning/practicing an alternative and switch over when you are confident enough (eg. 0.5-1 year later). I think you should learn Laravel as you already like it and find it easier. Express has better performance but that is not required for most of the small freelancer projects.

Looking at current technological trends and rise of JavaScript, you cannot go wrong with JavaScript. - There's an abundance of libraries to get most things done - You can use JavaScript for both the frontend and the backend - this allows you potentially share your logic/models/code across both stacks - A dynamic/interpreted language such as JavaScript is great for serverless (there's somewhat of a trend towards serverless aswell - especially in modern projects) - If you like/need static typing, you can always migrate seemlessly to Typescript - VueJS is a lightweight framework (compared to Angular), it has more GitHub stars and most would argue it's easier to work with (beginner friendly). Additionally most modern webapps do not use JQuery anymore (even though a lot of legacy projects continue to do so). You don't need JQuery if you use Vue/Angular/React

Additionally it doesn't seem like performance is a hugely important metric in your scenario, so JavaScript would suffice.

Note: These are all my opinions and what I've seen in the current market when recently searching for jobs.

I think Patrik and Alex are right: if you're comfortable with Spring Boot already, you'll be more productive right from the start.

If you wish to learn something else besides, both Laravel and Express are good choices. They aren't in the same category of frameworks: Laravel is an all-in-one solution, while Express is more like "build your own stack from different parts". Which implies that you can use whatever you want as a database engine: MySQL or PostgreSQL are perfectly valid choices (in my school, we teach Express with MySQL, because SQL is still a big thing here in France, and a sought-after skill). You can use Sequelize or TypeORM which support all major SQL DBMS.

Express is widely used, but if you're seeking the JavaScript equivalent of Spring Boot or Laravel, you probably want to look at NestJS. The only potential downside is that it's still young, maintained by a small commmunity, compared to those behind Spring Boot and Laravel.

Bottom line: using a stack tech, that you enjoy and are comfortable with, matters. Spring Boot + Vue.js seem perfectly fine to me. But do forget jQuery if you're using Vue.js, React or Angular, because it will definitely bring more harm than good!

I would definitely recommend you to go with Spring Boot + AngularJS + jQuery. Reasons: 1- You have an experience of 4 years with the above-mentioned stack. 2- As you mentioned that you wish to work as a freelancer, your stack is the perfect one for finding good bids with a little less effort than that of PHP + Laravel + Vue.js.

Hi as someone who employs and select developers i agree with a lot almost sayed but think of what are your strengths and where you are or better where your customers are. If you search for big enterprise projects spring boot is ok sql is must and html css as well. if you want to go more to internet related companies (like airbnb, what sup, facebook ) or similar (and not asia) then react is a must node js as well. The libraries tools etc which are used you need to adopt fast. If asia then VUE is a must. but if you like small projects with individuals or like wordpress or similar then you can learn php but i think in 2020 it is wasted time. Same for python in that area. and i also see that we often have problem that developer at least must understand docker docker compose better as it works with kubernetes ,.. just my 5 cents

As a developer myself, I would recommend you not to restrict yourself to JAVA, PHP or any other language. New Tools/languages keep coming every day. If you do plan to move to freelancing. PHP has a lot of options in the freelance space and a lot of competition too.

Learning PHP is as simple as learning any other language. It depends merely on your interest.

Personally if you can code, you should not restrict yourself. I have had to code in many languages, PHP, Perl, shell script, Python, Java, Javascript, Ruby etc... I would keep your developing skills and logic, algorithms etc.. and increase your knowledge and experience in the different languages.

I agree with you JAVA is a lot more time consuming. But it also has its enterprise level scope.

At the same time learning a new language should not be a barrier for you to stop exploring what's out there and keeping your skills up to date. Learning new technologies should be your primary focus and getting project out of your stack helps you build a good reputation.

There are many options for you to pursue. Having an open mindset will help you move forward. If you look to learn now, you are setting yourself up for a brighter future.

in order to stay employable, I'd work with something you can deliver with. if I'd be your client and you'd have to get comfortable with a new stack, I would 100% not pay you for this startup time. learn new stuff in your free-time. or set aside time for learning.

that said, if you want to reorientate, php (even though i personally hate it) is extremely wide spread. but so are java and nodejs. so I'm not a fan of that argument... i recommend building something in each language, and see what you enjoy more. for me it was nodejs, because I already enjoy frontend JavaScript, and appreciate the ecosystem and community.

regarding expressjs and mongodb: yes, it is a goto solution for a lot of tutorials, because its as simple as it gets. especially wben using something like monk. BUT if you want to use mysql, posgres or similar, check out TypeORM, Prism or another ORM-like solution. you can use any db with express, and there's plenty of abstraction layers, which make your life easier. but i noticed that expressjs does a lot less "holding hands" compared to .net core (c#), or laravel (php). can be a pro or a con.

I like fullstack freelancers who stacks are clean as one of below

1. PHP (laravel ) + Jquery + Bootstrap

2. Python(Django) + Angular JS or VueJS

3. NODEJS + REACTJS

Hey There, I would recommend going fullstack javascript since you already have experience with javascript on the front end it would be very easy to pickup node and express js. You can use sql with node and express if you please, but mongo is pretty easy to get going with.

Please, try to work with your comfortable stack, here is some recommendation

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.

Go with Python definetly. It's used everywhere by web developers for backend developments : API, website backend, workers... but also by data scientists (lot lot of resources, models and libraries in Python it's language #1). For the web parts, best web framework are in Python : https://stackshare.io/microframeworks (Flask #2 and Django #3). Java is good but trend is not great in terms of popularity amongs developers and tech leaders.

As per my experience java is most wanted for web development as of now. micro service is evolving . with frameworks like spring boot supports rapid development. Spring boot + Docker + kubernetes great combination.

I would recommend learning HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (most important). JavaScript forms the backbone of web development. And, there are many popular and widely used frameworks like Angular and React that heavily rely on the knowledge of JavaScript. The number of job opportunities are much more when it comes to javascript.

I would recommend Python as the programming language and as you are a new developer, Flask to start with. It gives you a solid understanding on the web patterns such as REST and will get you up and running in no time. However, I suggest you to read and study on front-end technologies like (React or Vue) and databases (SQL and NoSQL) and probably some NodeJS as well. First grasp the concepts (which Python is ideal for) then it does not really matter the language as such.

I would lean between Drupal and Laravel. Peer to peer selling shouldn't be too hard to set up using Drupal Commerce based modules (search for Marketplace). But if you don't find most of your requirements being met, you might want to go with Laravel. I know there are modules for Drupal that would help you achieve most of your requirements, so I would suggest doing some research there first.

It has the necessary packages for what you need, in addition to optimizing your time with what is needed.

Our base code

Depends where you find more confortable, ever tech work good. the most important is the what do you are looking in you scalable project

It has the necessary packages for what you need, in addition to optimizing your time with what is needed.

Node.js is great but if I had a choice for something like this I would pick Elixir and Phoenix. They have LiveViews and channels which be one step up then the other 3 plateforms. It will also scale better and respond faster. Last will probably far less code as well.

Node.js is the perfect tech to real-time features like chats, forums, quizzes and polls. Additionally it has great support for objects storage like Mongodb and its important for file media management.

I would suggest you to pick the right stack for the right purpose. My suggestion would be to go for Microservices approach and break your app into smaller pieces according to the type of functionality like you mentioned above. E.g if you would be expecting the high traffic on you platform, then Node.js can be used as the endpoint there to handle that traffic. Normal form processing can be done in Laravel but I would not suggest codeigniter as managing code is difficult there.

So this way you can decide do architecture you app and can use the best of the feature from all the languages. Even it would be easier for you to manage your app based on the functionality and team who will be working on that. Hope you would like my suggestions.

Node is light and scalable and has been used widely for enterprise solutions that need faster response, reliability and better performance. But at the end of the day, for me, when I start a project, I don't shoot for the stars. I build a small application with the possibility to scale in the future that will test my business idea. If the idea is getting volume then I really start thinking about how am I going to build this aiming a specific volume.

Hello , Our first version of www.voilacabs.com was programed with Code Ignitor PHP API's, and at times during peak hours when there were huge request's made the response time use to vary from 500 MS to 1 Minute, also at time's we might have to end up restarting PHP-FPM which use to bring things to normal.

Also PHP lacks features like promises queue, Asyc task, etc. which is supported in Node.js. In our V1 release we shifted to Node.js and since last 7 month's we see no lag in any API response, also all our API's are responding in 200-300 Milli Second's with about 8000+ Fleet's in peak hours. So my suggestion is to go with Node.js also you can either go with Mysql or MongoDB ( depending on the usage ) for DB choice's.

When it comes to hosting you can go with group replication which can be replicated across 3 different datacenters for your data safety. This approach will make your system largely scalable at 80% less price then amazon webservcies.

I hope that help's .

Hey Mohammad,

In your case I would definitely recommend Node.js as you already seem familiar with JavaScript and that experience will give definitely help you accomplish things faster in the backend side. The best advice I've always seen is to use what you already know, or something you enjoy using, and your passion will do the rest. As some folks have mentioned, Node.js is single-threaded by default but there's a lot of resources available on how to overcome that. Both Node.js and PHP have scaled for many companies, the examples are endless. If something gets heavy you offload it to a background job, if your reads and writes are getting heavy you can do some database optimizations, use an in-memory database and/or caching layers. Most scaling problems are related to how you read/write/process data and infrastructure more than they are to frameworks and programming languages. If you do indeed hit a wall with either of those programming languages being a bottleneck then in you could rewrite that one component only in a more performant language (e.g. Go/Rust/C/C++/Crystal and so on) but that's most likely something you won't have to think about for quite a while. Focus on the stack that you know so you can acquire more users and get to launch your product, scaling problems are nice to have and can be solved if they happen.

Good luck!

I have used both node and php in different projects. If it is true that initially node has better performance, in reality there is not much difference and feeling comfortable in the environment you use is very important. Also well written and optimized code. Php is also used by small and large companies. We have a file processing project that responds in less than 300ms with thousands of concurrent users and more than a million daily visits. And the key is to be able to develop quickly and efficiently. Personally I am much better in php than in node, so my code in php is much more clean and optimal than in node, so that's my option. I also find it easier to find php professionals than node, something very important to consider in a project. So the answer would be: choose the environment with which you feel more comfortable, because it will be with which you will have to fight every day.

Node is single-threaded by default, so you'll need to work on it. In the other hand, Node is better because you are already working with JavaScript as Frontend developer. Also, all you need is to make a prototype and Node is great for building simple API prototypes so I think the best way would be: make a nodejs prototype and test it - you'll get numbers with which you can work later. Take a look at Artillery.io and Mocha for testing. After that you can ask for someone's help in rewriting some endpoints or even make a separate api endpoint using another framework / language. Nginx would be helpful in this.

You can also have a look as Symfony. This has individual components that you can use based on the problem you are solving. In fact, Laravel users few of the Symfony components at core.

Laravel is a great solution to build web-based application using php. Of course it is matter which php version will you use, but php is much easier to develop, maintain and deploy.

Laravel has the necessary resources for you to develop a product (MVP) in which you can scale it over time. Despite saving development time.

It's a general development question, be more specific, because /dev/std... is a generic approach, not a targeted development. You want to develop PHP or Java? Both are good in their terms, but it's your decision. For PHP Laravel is a robust and exhaustive console enabled framework, featuring rich integrations with virtualization & REST. On the other hand, Spring will bring you learning curve if you are switching from PHP and so on. Try to match your needs with project requirements, it will be easier.

Laravel is lighter weight. Spring Boot quickly becomes a handful, as you'll be downloading hundreds of megabytes in dependencies for a few functions and a dynamic dependency there. There are multiple problems that are solved by "download and put it on your classpath by whatever means. Spring framework will automatically detect it and resolve the issue". It's magical when things work, but my teams have constantly found the limits of the framework's utility and starting points of their burden.

While my expertise with Laravel is more limited, I haven't seen this kind of mess in that community and God bless 'em for it.

Laravel all the way. i like the documentation, simplicity, and scalability