What technologies to use for the development of a web application?

[SarayP]

Good morning,
I'm new to web development. A month ago I developed a small web application using Firebird as a database, PHP to connect to the database and Bootstrap, Jquery and Datatables to show the data.

Now we are going to start a bigger project in which we need to develop user control, environment configuration, datagrids, CRUD, reports, importing data from Excel ... attachments, statistics ..., it would be a standard application that we think to have hosted on an own server and "sell" to potential customers.

What is certain is that we will continue with the Firebird database but we are evaluating what technologies to use and I have several doubts:

1.-RAD or Framework?
2.-Is it convenient to use MVC in this type of project?
3.-PDO or JSON to connect with the data? What is safer? And faster?

I have been investigating this for weeks and now I have more doubts than when I started, there are many possibilities and many utilities, I would appreciate any type of contribution based on your experience.
Thank you very very much.

[NickMNS]

First let me say that it impossible to give any specific recommendation in such a forum as the exact determination of your tech stack will depend on many factors that cannot be adequately evaluated in this or any other forum setting.

I developed several applications that are similar to your description. I typically use Python for all things server side that includes the web framework (Flask) and also any data-science/stats. For a db I prefer to use noSQL, specifically Mongodb as the JSON document structure works very efficiently with Python (dicts).

Client side, I stick with plain vanilla Javascript and make extensive use of Fetch and promises. This allows for easy integration should the need for Progressive Web App features be required.

Most recently I have also began to use some of Python's async frameworks like Quart which wraps Asyncio around Flask.

PDO or JSON to connect with the data?

I would stick with JSON as it is not language specific.

[Demaestro]

Nick makes some great suggestions.

Laravel is really nice and is very heavily adopted, which means lots of great tutorials and examples online. It offers a very lean development time with a lot of pre-defined wheels you don't have to reinvent, including PDO prepared statements, CSRF protection, etc. I have been using it for all new projects and can't say enough good things about it. It really depends on your requirements. I have seen some really nice stuff done in Angular lately but that is more suited for a "single page" styled app.

[tangor]

@SarayP .... Welcome to Webmasterworld!

Savvy advice already!

[Dimitri]

Hi,

It depends of what you really need to achieve. Personally I do everything in PHP, but if I was younger/beginner, I 'might" consider node.js too.

[SarayP]

Good morning!

Thank you very much for your advice, I will consider them
Have a great day!,
Saray

[tangor]

Best of luck going forward! Just remember the web is like the weather ... wait 15 minutes and it will change!

[bhukkel]

I just switched from PHP to Golang for the backend. Golang includes a webserver, so just one binary for your stack. No seperated configs and dependencies for Apache and PHP. Compile and Run!