I have some stuff running with minimal maintenance, never any surprises, just chugging along year after year.
These services are practically stackless: there’s a Node app with Express as the only dependency. No database, persistence to local files, entire data model cached in memory as JavaScript objects. When the service restarts, it rebuilds the memory image from the file system. The data formats are a mix of mostly append-only logs (JSON lines) and some plain JSON for objects where it doesn’t make sense to keep the full change history. Backups and restore to another server are super easy when there’s a bunch of files and a single Node script to launch.
Lately I’ve been building a hobby product where the front-end is stackless too. Plain HTML and modern JavaScript, using ES modules in the browser. No build chain at all. I don’t need to support IE so all modern language features are natively available, and the app is small enough that a bundler doesn’t deliver huge benefits. This means I don’t have access to npm, but so far it’s been fine because browsers do so much these days and the APIs have improved tremendously in the past decade.
I’ll probably stick with stackless for anything I maintain alone and doesn’t have huge growth expectations. But I wouldn’t expect to convince anyone else in a professional environment, so in the real world there’s no escaping from half-gig node_modules and complex Docker builds and all that dance.
These services are practically stackless: there’s a Node app with Express as the only dependency. No database, persistence to local files, entire data model cached in memory as JavaScript objects. When the service restarts, it rebuilds the memory image from the file system. The data formats are a mix of mostly append-only logs (JSON lines) and some plain JSON for objects where it doesn’t make sense to keep the full change history. Backups and restore to another server are super easy when there’s a bunch of files and a single Node script to launch.
Lately I’ve been building a hobby product where the front-end is stackless too. Plain HTML and modern JavaScript, using ES modules in the browser. No build chain at all. I don’t need to support IE so all modern language features are natively available, and the app is small enough that a bundler doesn’t deliver huge benefits. This means I don’t have access to npm, but so far it’s been fine because browsers do so much these days and the APIs have improved tremendously in the past decade.
I’ll probably stick with stackless for anything I maintain alone and doesn’t have huge growth expectations. But I wouldn’t expect to convince anyone else in a professional environment, so in the real world there’s no escaping from half-gig node_modules and complex Docker builds and all that dance.