Tools & Technologies

Frontend

React.JS

React.JS was one of the frameworks that our team thought of initially. React being one of the most powerful frontend frameworks with being able to work with a backend and database, this was a logical choice. However, React is also one of the hardest frameworks to learn, so we are keeping our options open, and looking at other subsets of React such as Next.JS which is explained below.

Next.JS

Next.JS came to our attention after two meetings with a company in Germany creating an application called Deta. Meeting up with them, they showed their technologies and the benefits of using Next vs React. Doing further research Next.JS has been used in various websites such as Netflix, Hulu, and others.

Taichen is currently doing extensive research with Next.JS since she will be leading the charge on the frontend, and this blog has also been created with Next.JS.

Next.JS which could be combined with Prisma (a database ORM) is able to produce static site generation with dynamic content. Next would be both a frontend and a backend.

Backend

Django

Django, which has it's own ORM is a popular choice for a backend. At Amazon, it was brought to my attention from speaking to an application developer, that when you build a large scale application for a lot of users. It makes your life easier to have your frontend seperate from your backend. Our team initally thought of using Flask, but we knew that Flaks was too light for our task since we wanted to scale up.

Other

Anvil

Anvil is a complete framework using Python for drag and drop websites. This is similiar to other websites such as SquareSpace, Webflow, etc. Playing around with Anvil was nice, however I felt like I was spending more time trying to figure out how to do basic functionality. The application was really slow aswell.

Conclusion

Our team has finally decided to choose Next.JS as our framework. Next has the same amount of power as React, since it can still use React components for the frontend. We will be using Tailwind CSS to help with our styling, and we will use Prisma combination to facilitate our PostgreSQL database. Since NextJS is able to render dynamic content to a static form before rendering the HTML page, we will also use Next as a standalone framework without hooking up a backend to it.