Getting back into the web dev – overwhelmed by framework choices

[SOMMS]

Long story short: I'm an experienced developer who's been 'out-of-the-game' for the past 5 years doing things other than web development.

I am making a mobile app and need to make its web-side counter part...but am overwhelmed by the sheer number of web frameworks out there. Is Rails still the king? I see a lot of love for Node. Also...lots of PHP based stacks out there. Spring boot?

Things I am looking for in a framework: -authentication plug-in -basic CRUD -basic NOSQL -ability to attache images -beautification (like Bootstrap...something other than stock controls) -an active community and/or documentation where I can go for help

Bonus: I like the idea of single page web-apps like Angular or React. Is there a back-end framework that works particularly well with these?

Thanks,

PS-yes I've googled this question but honestly it yielded more questions than answers!

[zeroprox]

It really depends on the programming languages that you're comfortable with. The biggest one that I personally would suggest is the .net ecosystem. You can use Xamarin to build your mobile apps, asp.net/asp.net core to build your web application/rest api, and a lot of the things that you're looking for can easily be added using nugets (.nets package manager) all by knowing C#. If you like single page applications look into https://blazor.net/ which is a pretty new SPA framework (still in early testing/concept) using C#/Web assembly on the front end. Like I said personally .net is one of my favorite stacks. The other is Django which is also a great framework for building web apps/apis. Recently I've been playing around with a web ecosystem in golang called Buffalo which seems pretty promising if you like go.

[cimmanom]

Any back end will work fine with those front-end frameworks. You just have to be able to build out an HTTP API. Rails is still perfectly viable, just less dominant than 5 years ago.

If you’re building this thing to have it built, I’d say go with what you know - at least on the back end where what you know is still relevant. Learning new front end paradigms will be enough of a challenge in itself.

If you’re building it primarily as a learning project, then go ahead and pick up something new for the back end too.