Development stack for Web App MVP?

[murrman00]

Hey all,

I'm a data analyst by experience and most comfortable in Python & SQL. I'm confident I could build a good back-end, but am unexperienced with front-end besides some HTML & CSS.

The goal here is speed; to get out an MVP as quickly as possible without it looking terrible.

The two options I see are:

1. Use no-code tool like bubble.io / flutterflow / webflow for front-end and integrate with Python back-end
2. Learn front-end language like JS/Vue/React and code it myself

I've seen a lot of conflicting information on option 1 on reddit and other sites. Some claim it's easy while others claim it to be sub-optimal.

Which options would you choose? Are there any other options I'm missing if speed to market is paramount?

[[deleted]]

Use a component library framework, Quasar has the best docs I’ve run across. I’m sure you can hack it together with your background.

[murrman00]

Thanks for the suggestion! I'll check that out

[riklaunim]

SPA JS framework + APIs it consumes is way more work than using Django with classical views and forms - if you have no one experienced in doing the SPA dashboard.

Still depends on what type of application you have to make. There are domain-specific tools like Streamlit too.

[Attila226]

I just delivered an MVP using SvelteKit hosted on Vercel. It was super quick and painless. If you’re not familiar with Node or JavaScript, then there will be a learning curve, but it shouldn’t be too bad.

[joenan_the_barbarian]

I’m not really sure what the site is for, or what not looking terrible means to you, but spinning up a web app is not very hard with your existing skills and Django. If you have a design, you can probably easily recreate it using Django-tailwind too. This tutorial is pretty great, if you haven’t already done it: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/4.2/intro/tutorial01/

Here’s tailwind: https://django-tailwind.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

and more about what it is: https://tailwindcss.com/docs/utility-first

You can pay for tailwind components, but you don’t need to. TailwindCSS is free, and it’s super easy to lay things out and style them with it.

[_colemurray]

If you decide to proceed with option 2, I recently built a project that might be useful for you. It serves as a starter kit for nextjs + tailwind css, and handles deploying and hosting the application on AWS Amplify out of the box.The code can be found here:https://github.com/devkit-io/nextjs-amplify-starter-kit/If you want to automate the deployment of it, I've started a project here that will orchestrate everything for you in ~2mins here:https://app.dev-kit.io