Choosing the right web development stacks is one of the crucial things to consider. After all, it will determine the software’s functionality, features, and interface and eventually impact numerous layers of your business.
You can spend hours digging into the vast current programming language trends, but first, you need to navigate through several high-end technologies. And even after long hours of searching, it still can be confusing for business owners.
So let's clear things up and understand what a web development stack is and what tools and technologies power the software development process. Then, we will consider them from the point of view of their position in the software development anatomy. Eventually, that will enable us to shortlist the top trending programming languages in 2024.
Say you’ve come up with a brilliant web app idea and know it will become the next big thing in your industry. You’ll need to get started with the development process that will be efficient, error-free, and quick so that no competitor is ahead.
To reach those objectives, the best way is to rely on a set of proven technologies that developers can use in tandem. That’s where stacks for web development come in handy.
Therefore, the tech stack is the combination of multiple underlying technologies used to develop the data architecture that helps run and deploy an application. Apart from affecting technical factors, the tech stack also aids in outlining essential business decisions.
Business owners can determine what skills they need to fill development teams based on a chosen tech stack. Besides, they can estimate the projected efficiency of the development effort and shortlist the pool of solutions they can bring to the market and users.
Different stacks for web development exist to help businesses create new pieces of software. They can cater to the two standard web development parts with varying areas of responsibility. Let’s have a look at them.
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The best way to understand web development is to represent it as a two-way process:
Both parts of web development should be taken into account to execute the project flawlessly. With them, your product will meet stringent market requirements and remain consistent with time.
The current technology landscape provides numerous types of stacks in web development, which can help implement common use cases. Some work best to ensure an application’s scalability, user-friendliness, and stability. Other technologies become parts of the best tech stacks for fast development, which helps decrease time-to-market and keep customers ahead of competitors.
As a result, every business can prefer web development technology stack components that solve business goals and necessities. However, some have become trendy and made it to the list of the best tech stacks in 2024. Let’s look at them.
Recent research data suggests that the most in-demand technologies in popular stacks for web development include Javascript, Java, and Python. These are the most sought-after programming languages by recruiters in 2023, as cited by the novel CodinGame developer survey.
In-demand by recruiters:
According to another survey conducted by Statista in 2023, the most widely used languages among developers include:
Another indicator that leads us to choose programming languages from the best tech stacks is their popularity on search engines. For that, we considered the top contenders in the regularly updated TIOBE and PYPL ratings.
As of May 2024, the TIOBE index denotes that the top contenders are Python, C, C++, Java, C#, JavaScript, Visual Basic, Go, SQL, and Fortran. As we can see from the table below, Python and C secured their leading positions as there are no changes in their positions compared to the results demonstrated in May 2023. Meanwhile, Go showed impressive growth in popularity in 2024. It climbed from the 12th position as of May 2023 to the 8th line. Another programming language on the list that deserves our attention is Fortran. Within the previous 12 months, it jumped from the 19th line to the 10th position.
According to the PYPL rating that analyzes the most trending programming languages and technologies, as of May 2024, the top winners secured their positions are Python, Java, and JavaScript. A wider rating looks the following way:
Powered by the most recent research data, we can present the most in-demand programming technologies to use at different phases of the web development process and for other purposes in 2024.
It is hard to imagine front-end development without the most common technologies out there:
According to Stackoverflow 2023’s results, JavaScript is the most popular technology among professional developers. HTML/CSS occupied second place in the list. This year, Python managed to overtake SQL as the third most popular computing language among developers.
There are helpful frameworks for HTML and CSS. Bootstrap and Foundation are among the most popular and loved ones by developers. Bootstrap helps reduce development time and create responsive websites rendered equally in all modern browsers. Foundation gives developers more flexibility when working on the interface. It offers an extended suite of tools that facilitate the creation of large corporate websites.
As the current trends in programming languages adoption suggest, developers and employers maintain a strong interest in the technology. We can observe that from the data collected by the previously mentioned researchers (CodinGame and Stackoverflow):
| CodinGame | Stackoverflow |
|---|---|
| 52.93% of recruiters needed JavaScript developers in 2023 (in 2022, this figure was 62%) 61.54% of developers coded in JavaScript in 2023 (64% - in 2022) | 63.61% of developers coded in JavaScript in 2023, while in 2022, its percentage was 68% |
No Javascript tech stack is complete without special tool kits that help accelerate web development and provide a structured organization of the code. Among them, jQuery, Angular.js, React.js, and Vue.js are the most preferred frameworks. Each has its tasks to solve, and it is essential to know their features and application domains.
Let's look at the survey conducted by StackOverflow in 2023. We can see that Node.js and React.js lead the pack as the broadly used frameworks for web development based on the opinions of more than 71,000 respondents with different levels of skills:
It’s interesting to note that Node.js and React were chosen as the most popular options by both professional developers and those who are just starting their journey in programming. However, while React and Node.js (42.87% and 42.73% respectively) are practically equally used by professionals, the positions of these frameworks are different among developers who are learning to code. 42.44% of them use Node.js, while 36.66% prefer React.
The same competition can be observed in other studies. According to Statista, as of 2023, Node.js overtook React.js and managed to become the most used web framework used by developers worldwide.
Moreover, there are some other changes in their responses. For example, while the top positions named by professional developers include Angular and ASP.NET Core, these technologies are much less popular among developers with no experience. At the same time, newcomers actively work with Django and Next.js instead.
The back-end part consists of the following components:
Programming languages are used to provide interoperability between databases, servers, and the front end of a website or app.
Which programming languages are included in the world’s top web development stacks? Here are the most common mentions:
Here’s how the top back-end technologies compare in terms of their positions in different ratings:
| Programming Languages | Stackoverflow | TIOBE | PYPL | Statista |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Python | 3 | 1 | 1 | 3 |
| Node.js | 1 | - | - | 1 |
| Java | 7 | 4 | 2 | 7 |
| C# | 8 | 5 | 4 | 8 |
| C++ | 9 | 3 | 5 | 9 |
| PHP | 11 | 16 | 7 | 11 |
| Go/Golang | 13 | 8 | 12 | 13 |
As we can see, regardless of the difference in data and approaches to conducting research, the most trending programming language for the back-end part is Python. As for the most commonly used web technologies, Node.js is the major leader, despite the fact that it is closely followed by React.
Databases provide the permanent storage of data. They can be either relational or non-relational.
Let's refer to StackOverflow's survey conducted in 2023 once again. As it offers one of the most comprehensive coverages of trends among professional developers, we can find that the PostgreSQL database is the most preferred option:
The image illustrates the percentage of respondents opting for a specific technology.
According to this data, PostgreSQL is at position number one worldwide, followed closely by MySQL. Anyway, MySQL has remained on top of the game as it offers an intuitive interface and batch commands that can reliably process vast loads of data. It's also free software, though it is regularly updated and improved in terms of security.
As for developers who are learning to code, the situation is slightly different. With 45.71%, MySQL is the most popular option. MongoDB (28.15%) and SQLite (26.93%) occupy the 2nd and 3rd positions, while PostgreSQL is only in the 4th place with 23.38%.
Servers receive and process requests from various user devices. Some of the most popular web servers as of now:
Now that you know the standard components of web development let's proceed to full-stack solutions that dominate the industry.
The most popular stacks are the following:
The LAMP stack is a suite of free, open-source software comprising Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP technologies. LAMP has become the standard of web development and has remained classic through the years.
The LAMP stack runs on any operating system and almost any Linux distribution. It handles dynamic pages, which allows developers to support projects that rely on ongoing content changes. Besides, its components are accessible to interchange and modify within the same generic stack.
LAMP’s agile and reliable nature makes it a solid foundation for renowned platforms like Shopify, WordPress, and Drupal. It allows business owners to create extensible and high-performance websites and applications.
MEAN is a term under which the three JavaScript frameworks (ExpressJS, AngularJS, NodeJS) and a document-oriented NoSQL (MongoDB) database are united. Since ExpressJS, AngularJS and NodeJS are written using JavaScript, the development of MEAN applications can only be written in this programming language. That is one reason why the tech stack remains popular, coupled with its advanced flexibility and accessible code transfer.
The MEAN stack consists of open-source technologies, which allows developers to create apps quickly at a fraction of the cost. It excels in delivering apps and websites that need to accommodate temporary traffic spikes. Companies use the MEAN stack to develop single-page applications (SPAs), streaming apps, news aggregator websites, and calendar and route-finding applications.
MERN consists of MongoDB, ExpressJS, React/Redux, and NodeJS. It gained immense popularity for using ReactJS for the front-end and NodeJS for the back-end parts. It is widely used for creating high-performance off-the-shelf web applications.
The MERN stack’s underlying technologies make it easy to build and deploy social media platforms, news aggregation apps, websites, and to-do apps. Netflix and Uber leverage this web development tech stack for their needs.
As the Python-Django stack is based on one of the most popular web development languages, it is likely to remain in the list of top web development stacks in 2024 and beyond.
Developers generally combine it with the Apache web server, MySQL, and the Django framework for server-side development. Django is the right solution for any website because of the many third-party packages available. If you want to create a complex user experience, being fluent in Javascript is required.
Besides, the Python-Django tech stack enables companies to develop, deploy, and scale certain web applications quickly. Instagram, Disqus, and Piterest picked this full-stack solution because of its usefulness and the ability to compensate for growing user bases. Django makes it easy to handle rising volumes of traffic and API requests and meet changing business needs.
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In this article, we focused on the landscape of tools that will power modern web development in 2024. We aimed to denote which tech stacks come forward and explain the reasons for their popularity.
For more practical advice on choosing the right tech stack depending on the project size and complexity, go to the second part of our blog posts. You will overview the technologies that are driving the development of modern web apps. In our next publication, we also investigate the tech stacks behind successful projects. Stay tuned!
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