What is a good option for web app building in 2026 that has:
- an answer to perpetual supply chain attacks
- a solid type system
- enforces neither OOP 101 style nor functional compiler PhD style programming
- has answers and tooling for common patterns like “there’s a collection in the database and we need to build a CRUD API with cursor based pagination”, loading and error component states, input debouncing.
- full control over the rendering of the site (CSR/SSR/SSG) on a per component basis
This isn’t a thing right?
Anything in the JS ecosystem fails for at least the supply chain reason, and arguably the “common patterns aren’t solved” reason
Python & PHP seem not to have a great type system, maybe I’m wrong about PHP
Everything that’s not JS based can’t do CSR (except maybe if it treats JS as a target language?) WASM still doesn’t have access to web APIs (and honestly should it? Terrorist backend architects firing all the web devs and replacing them with frontend Java)
Sorry to tech-post on main, I thought about my day job to an extent that is not healthy for me and not warranted by anyone involved.
@hughrawlinson Python is catching up on type system grounds. Have a look at fastAPI. There is a whole ecosystem growing, native type hints, static checking (pyright, Ty and more), runtime checks (pydantic).
@jakub I need to give it a solid try. I love how it’s connected to the good old REST principles. I vaguely have some hesitation because I see them as a bit antagonistic/hostile towards JS/TS, which has been a thing that has turned me away from many projects and ideas over the years. But I have nothing concrete in my memory about what they’ve done or said, so it might just be a wrong impression I have.
@xenia thanks, I’ll take a look. I do work with python currently and it seems to be a mess of assertions and poor tooling - but that might just be an us problem.
@hughrawlinson @xenia +1 for FastAPI, although from what I’ve done of it I wish it was a bit more batteries included, I suspect for anything complex you’re going to end up pulling in additional packages.
@hughrawlinson @xenia you can very much end up in this state with typescript as well. I think typescript can do what you want to do, but when it comes to supply chain attacks that comes from decision making and not the ecosystem itself. Asking whether you need a wrapper for xyz from a package, or whether you can implement your own minimal functionality for what you want to do. Left field option try Go and Wasm, or trendy go with Rust
@bridge we are very aligned IMO. I’d love to do Rust & wasm. Sticking with TS though - how do you feel about Vercel/Next/RSC?
@hughrawlinson @xenia I absolutely feel you on the original question. Somehow there no longer seems to be an option for “I just want some sanely structured code to put content in a browser” like there was back in the days of PHP being everywhere. (Or maybe my idea of “sanely structured” has changed)
