The best backend tools in web development

If you’re a backend developer, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the range of backend development tools available. It goes without saying that you should use what works for you but sometimes it’s not that easy to even work that out.

With this in mind, this year’s Skill Up report offers a useful insight into some of the most popular backend tools being used today. Let’s take a look at what tools came out on top. That should help you make decisions about what you’re going to use or maybe even just learn.

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Node.js

More than 50% respondents said, they prefer Node.js, the popular server-side Javascript coding framework. Node.js is a Javascript runtime that runs on the V8 JavaScript runtime engine. Node.js adds capabilities to Javascript (front-end language) to let it do more than just creating interactive websites. It uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight and efficient.

The latest stable release of Node, Node 10, will be the next candidate in line for the Long Term Support (LTS) in October 2018. Node.js 10.0 comes with plenty of new features like OpenSSL 1.1.0 security toolkit, upgraded npm, N-API, and much more.

Get started with learning Node.js with the following books:

Learning Node.js Development
Learn Node.js by Building 6 Projects
RESTful Web API Design with Node.js 10 - Third Edition

ASP.NET Core

The next popular alternative was ASP. NET Core with over 25% developers approving it as their choice of backend framework. ASP.NET Core is the open-source cross-platform framework for building backends, web apps and services, and IoT apps. According to the skill-up survey, it was also one of the most popular framework used by developers. It provides a cloud-ready, environment-based configuration system. It seamlessly integrates with popular client-side frameworks and libraries, including Angular, React, and Bootstrap.

Get started with ASP.NET Core by reading:

Learning ASP.NET Core 2.0
Mastering ASP.NET Core 2.0
ASP.NET Core 2 High Performance - Second Edition

Express.js

Developers and tech pros also like to work with Express JS, and hence it ranked No. 3 on our list. Express JS is the pre-built Node JS framework that can help developers build faster and smarter websites and web apps. Express basically extends Node.js to build complete web apps.

It is the perfect framework to learn for developers, who are fluent in Node.js, but want to transition to creating apps from just server-side technologies. Express is lightweight and comes with extra, built-in web application features and the Express API to support the already robust, feature-packed Node.js platform.

Express is not just limited to NodeJS. It also works seamlessly with other modules and offers HTTP utilities and middleware for creating APIs. It can help developers master single-page and multiple-page websites, as well as some complex web apps.

You can go through Projects in ExpressJS [Video], a complete course to learn professional web development using Express.js.

Laravel

Next, was Laravel, a prominent member of a new generation of web frameworks. It is one of the most popular PHP frameworks and is also free and and open source. It features:

• A simple, fast routing engine
• Powerful dependency injection container
• Multiple back-ends for session and cache storage
• Database agnostic schema migrations
• Robust background job processing
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• Real-time event broadcasting

The latest stable release, Laravel 5 is a substantial upgrade with a lot of new toys, at the same time retaining the features that made Laravel wildly successful. It comes with plenty of architectural as well as design-based changes.

Start building with Laravel with these videos.

Beginning Laravel [Video]
Laravel Foundations: Basics to Every App [Video]

Java EE

The fifth most popular choice of backend tool is the Java EE. The Enterprise Java standard or Java EE is a collection of technologies and APIs for the Java platform designed to support Enterprise. By enterprise, we mean applications classified as large-scale, distributed, transactional and highly-available, designed to support mission-critical business requirements.

Applications written to comply with the Java EE specification do not tie developers to a specific vendor; instead, they can be deployed to any Java EE compliant application server. The Java EE server application implements the Java EE platform APIs and provides the standard Java EE services.

The latest stable release, Java EE 8 brings with it a load of features, mainly targeting newer architectures such as microservices, modernized security APIs, and cloud deployments.

Our best picks for learning Java EE:

Java EE 8 Application Development
Architecting Modern Java EE Applications
Java EE 8 High Performance

The other backend tools which were among the top picks by developers included:

• Spring, a programming and configuration model for building modern Java-based enterprise applications, on any kind of deployment platform.
• Django, a powerful Python web framework for creating RESTful web services. It reduces the amount of trivial code, which simplifies the creation of web applications and results in faster development.
• Flask, a framework for building web servers in Python. It is a micro framework, meaning it’s not a full stack web application development framework. It just gives the developers very basics to get a web server running.
• Firebase, Google’s mobile platform to help developers run mobile backend code without managing servers and develop high-quality apps.
• Ruby on Rails, one of the oldest, backend technology. A certain percentage of people still prefer using ruby on rails for their backend code. Rails is a flexible and IDE friendly framework with easy functions and manipulations and the support of the powerful ruby language.

The entire skill up survey report can be read on the Packt website, which details on what developers think about the changing tech landscape and the parameters that are driving that change. This survey report is launched at the start of the Skill Up campaign, where every eBook and video will be available for $10. Go grab your free content now!