The last 10 years I work with Delphi & MS-SQL Server for building desktop apps and back-end systems in Windows. The last years I have considered some web-based projects but the distance from the tools I 'm familiar with to a decent stack for web apps is huge - sure I can build the back-end in Delphi but then deployment get's complicated, especially for small projects that do not worth setting app a complicated CI/CD tool chain.
So I was in search for a more suitable stack, my requirements were more or less the following:
- Small set of new languages
- Easy setup of the development environment
- Deployment options.
After some consideration I decided to go with the following stack:
- MS SQL Server
- Node.js
- HTML & Javascript
HTML & Javascript is a no-brainer, a website can target most of the devices that are used today.
Node.js was also an easy choice, it uses javascript so I can leverage what ever I learn for the front-end, and is popular enough to be deployable in almost all cloud platforms as well as both in Apache & IIS and both under Windows and Linux. Also as it is a new, hot technology there are a lot of guides and has a very active community. Setting up the developing environment is also very simple.
MS SQL Server is a rather strange choice but in my case it has some advantages, first of all it's a tool that I'm familiar with, I have it already available in my dev machines and I can re-use a lot of tooling that I have available. There also many options for deploying MS SQL Server (Managed in Azure, unmanaged in Google Cloud, Local installation in windows & linux)
This stack allows me to develop and deploy either to my dev-machine or completely managed in azure.
Sure some tools of this stack may not be optimal for large-scale web projects but the issue of this post is to describe a stack for small projects which may or may-not move forward to become large-scale enough...
Top comments (2)
I'm just like you, but Delphi still gets bigger in my country, especially when it comes to retail sale soft development, most of all issues of treasury integration are supplied by libraries written in Delphi. But I had to make the same choice, and I see node as a pretty good choice, but if you want to keep Delphi, like a middleware to create yours Rests API, they got The Datasnap which also works pretty fine.
I learned OOP with Delphi / Object Pascal back in the day but I haven't used it in eons!
Welcome to the crazy world of web development :-)