This is a post I hope to reflect on in the future and see what 2023 was like.

This is not intended to be a guide on creating webapps. It is purely for my own reference. It is also not an exhaustive list of options.

Serverless

Serverless apps are becoming more common lately, although I don't believe they are very common in enterprise.

Hosting a serverless app is usually very simple, but you are locked into whatever cloud provider you choose.

The main ones that I know of are:

Lambda

Lambda is AWS' version of cloud functions that can be executed based on certain event types. You can create micro (or monolith) services manually in Lambda.

Serverless framework

This is basically a wrapper around CloudFormation (infrastructure defined in yaml files), but tailored for developing Lambda microservices with ease.

AWS Amplify

Amplify is a managed way to create full-stack apps in AWS. You can create GraphQL or REST APIs with Lambda without touching the Lambda service itself. It has many other features. My blog is using Amplify as a backend.

Nextjs / Nuxtjs

Nextjs (React) and Nuxtjs (Vue) are popular full-stack frameworks that allow server-side rendering and/or static site generation in the same codebase. Hosting for these is usually complex or very vendor-locked-in.

Serverful

There are many options for hosting serverful apps in 2023. You can choose:

• Managed
• Non-managed
• Containerised

Some managed options include AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Heroku and Fly.io. Managed options have cool features like CI/CD, automatic updates, automatic SSL and more.

Non-managed means you have to manage the server yourself, usually through SSH. Options include AWS Lightsail, AWS EC2 and any other VPS provider.

Containerised apps (usually using Docker) are specific runtime environments for your applications. They can run on any VPS or many managed and non-managed providers.

Serverful web frameworks:

ASP.NET

Since .NET Core was released, we are not locked in to Visual Studio for development or Windows Server for hosting. ASP.NET is a strongly typed C#/MSIL framework for creating full-stack apps. Their newest thing is Blazor, which ships with a C# webassembly library so you don't need any JavaScript.

Ruby on Rails

Rails is getting a bit old but is still very popular. It is a highly opinionated full-stack Ruby framework that seems to have a Ruby Gem for anything you need. It has a lot of 'magic' built in, which I strongly dislike, but considering how nice the framework and language is, I think it is worth it.

Laravel

Laravel is PHP's take on the modern full-stack framework. I haven't tried it but have read the docs and it seems incredible (which is what everyone says). I love PHP, just can't deal with the ecosystem and tooling.

There are many other popular frameworks, but I don't know enough about them to comment.