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I'm Building a Full-Stack App: Here Are the Libraries I'm Going to Use...

Anmol Baranwal on February 28, 2024

There are countless frameworks and libraries that you can use to improve your full-stack application. We will cover exciting concepts like in-app ...
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terabytetiger profile image
Tyler V. (he/him)

What's the use case for including all of:

  • Appwrite
  • NocoDB
  • Supabase
  • Zenstack
  • Buildship

I feel like there's a lot of overlap in these, but I'm more Frontend focused so I'd love to know more about the intent here 😊

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Anmol Baranwal

Each project serves a different purpose and has its own community.
Even though I've used Firebase & Supabase, each platform has unique features that make them distinct.
For instance, Buildship is different from these (for scraping or workflow using APIs).

While Appwrite and Supabase both offer backend services, they have different use cases. For instance, you cannot migrate functions from one to another (difference in DB as well). Technology keeps evolving, so there may be similarities, but it ultimately depends on your project needs and personal preference.

You can check the difference between Zenstack and NocoDB as well.

That's why I included each of them in the list -> they all bring something valuable to the table. I hope this helps :D

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terabytetiger profile image
Tyler V. (he/him)

I'm Building a Full-Stack App: Here Are the Libraries I'm Going to Use...

I think I'm confused - so are you not building an app using all of them like the title says? 😅

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anmolbaranwal profile image
Anmol Baranwal

If you're a developer, you would already know the answer to that.

I truly laughed when you asked if I'm going to use all 30 open source libraries. LOL! I'm definitely not that expert.

The title suggests in an appropriate way that these are the libraries I could use to build my next project. Not all! It's like you can build entire solutions considering full-stack domain with combinations of these.

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Aravind Putrevu

You should change the title to say - 30 libraries I'd consider to build a full stack app in 2024

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krlz profile image
krlz

I was also hyped about it and is not so crazy to do, a big project might have it

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JoelBonetR 🥇

Why? 😂

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jeremiah_the_dev_man profile image
Jeremiah

Wow... That's a long one haha. Love it! some great libraries.

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Anmol Baranwal

Thanks!
Some of the libraries are truly one of a kind especially Remotion and Resend :D

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Makar

what about Wasp and Mermaid -- both sound amazing on the paper )
I guess it's a shame I hear about both the first time, but then again -- we're all on DEV to get up to date. Thanks much!

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Repro Dev

This is a handy list to bookmark and come back to later when I'm trying to work out what I need to use for my random projects.

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uliyahoo profile image
uliyahoo

Yup

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uliyahoo profile image
uliyahoo

This is the best Listicle I've seen on Dev. Awesome work Anmol!

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Anmol Baranwal

Woah! Best listicle -> that is very noble of you to say.
Thanks so much! I truly appreciate it :D

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Steve Lebleu

In the disorder, a little bit of all:

  • Netlify
  • Vercel
  • Nx
  • Rush stack
  • Stencil
  • Turbo
  • Helios
  • Dynatrace
  • Datadog
  • Aikido
  • Jit
  • Semgrep
  • ...
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ranjancse profile image
Ranjan Dailata

Please read this 104k-bill before choosing the provider. In this case "Netlify".

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joelbonetr profile image
JoelBonetR 🥇

I keep thinking that a good'ol VPS (<10 bucks a month) is way better (100% security against "surprises").
You can always upgrade to a higher tier and if you need more than that you should've figured out how to monetize your app by then.

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fyodorio profile image
Fyodor

Yes, because most of the tools mentioned around behave crazy when scaled even a little

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steve-lebleu profile image
Steve Lebleu

Was not aware, thanks for the information.

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Umbetov Asman

Some of these libraries i have no idea why would anyone need unless for a very specific use case, like what is remotion doing on the 6th place??

Libraries that you really need for building a full-stack app are:

  1. Some UI library/framework – React/Svelte/HTMX
  2. (optional) Some backend framework for a language of your choosing. Most of the times you could just use the standard HTTP library that comes packaged with the language

that's it. No one needs 30 libraries to build a full stack app.

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Laurens

This is just way too many dependencies no? I thought I was scrolling a Facebook feed 😮

I think it’s fun to use all these promising libraries but won’t this introduce a ton of pain to keep the app going and up to date?

Good writeup!

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Nathan G Bornstein

I think it was moreover offering options to choose from for a full stack application, based on one's own need for whatever they require. Adding all of these into a single application would absolutely be over kill.

You do make a good point about obsolescence in 3rd party packages though. That will always be an issue for external dependencies. The amount of npm packages that hundreds-of-thousands rely upon that are out of date is frightening to say the least. Doesn't stop everyone from depending on them, though 🙃

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Eckehard • Edited

How do you manage this "bag of fleas"? Do you employ a nanny? Hopefully there is enough time left to do some work, if you are busy all the day to install and get to know all this tools....

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Anmol Baranwal

Haha! After all we are human and we should try to help others as much as we can.

Just to let you know, these tools are not for a "single application".
It provides a wide variety of things that you can use, for instance you can use Resend for email API (yet to try on a large scale) which got kitty awards as far as I remember.
Or you can use Remotion -> if you've seen github unwrapped.

Trust me! While using a lot of libraries may seem like overkill, creating an extraordinary solution brings a lot of happiness :D

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Eckehard

But as long as you are not a professional tool tester, someone has to pay you to play around with all these tools. They won´t pay you for your pleasant smile!

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Fyodor

Yea, one probably shouldn't delegate everything to external tools 😅

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Emeka Elo-Chukwuma

The primary aim of this article is to be bookmarked(amongst other engagements) and hopefully remembered to be revisited when working on a project.

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Shrijal Acharya

This is a really good list of tech stacks. Great job, @anmolbaranwal. Love these! 🙌

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Nathan Tarbert

A lot of great libraries listed here, nice article Anmol!

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kyoukhana profile image
kyoukhana

And how many dependencies is this project going to have?

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kamran2121

It's for full stack projects in general, not a single project...

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Marc Peejay V. Viernes

Awesome! I've never heard of some of these gems before. Thanks for letting me know 👍

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Rob

I have been wondering on how to implement some things into my project, and this is very helpful.

Great article! 🙏

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Michael Knopke

I would immediately quit if my company decides to use all those libraries for a project, lol. (Yes, I know you did not mean that, but the title is still click-bait)

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Bernd Wechner

With all due respect I find the title somewhat misleading. I am a full stack developer. Let me illustrate what the term "full stack" means to me, but first what it doesn't mean: a survey primarily of a pile of JavaScript tools l use.

So what do I understand under "full stack" developement? Here's what I focus on:

  1. OS (typically I use Ubuntu Server but not always)
  2. Filesystems (I'm moving to btrfs on my servers slowly for more rapid recovery)
  3. Databases (I lean almost exclusively on postrgresql at present and that isn't likely to change any time soon)
  4. Webserver (I lean on lighttpd almost exclusively simply because it's foss, works well on low resource systems like routers and scales well and freshly I like consistency)
  5. Language support (I work with a variety here but uwsgi and python and venv support is common, I do a bit of PHP and even a little Node.js but I may dive into others at times as I lean on foss)

Of course there's more to most of that (not least the dev tools and publishing process etc).

So by full stack I read: from the user experience (front end, mostly html, CSS, is) down to the os and fs. That's the full stack.

I go one further as I still use bare metal so manage hand me down servers (hardware raid too).

Oh, and above all, I'm not bragging, far from it, many a sensible reader would judge dealing with the full stack let alone the extent I've laid out as unnecessary, or unusual if not futile (virtual servers are now so cheap and containerision so mature and DevOps tools abound etc). But shrug, it's what I do as in have hand me down hardware and like tinkering and learning and host NFP sites with low traffic for free.

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Carlos Ricardo Ziegler

Great content :) Thanks. I will add:

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Alex

This looks like way too many, even for the complex project.

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Navin Yadav

wow man

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RESTful_Otaku

One day I will see more articles like 'I am going to build a full-stack app, with as few external libraries and dependencies as humanly possible'.

Then, we will have turned a corner...

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Sacha Wharton

This is one incredible list!!! Thank you for these gems, especially Doppler. :-)

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Jesse Crockett

Do you have an app template for getting started with these tools?

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flowzai profile image
Flowzai

This is a master class. Thank you very much.

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Matija Sosic

Cool list, thanks for the mention! :) For even faster start use github.com/wasp-lang/open-saas - a 100% free and open-source boilerplate starter on top of React, Node.js and Wasp :)

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Nima Mohajeri

This is dependency hell if you ask me.

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aelius profile image
Victor

Excuse me, but I don't think you should use dev.to as public storage for all of your bookmarks.

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Dvir Daniel

for authentication isn't better to use auth0.com or eartho.io?