Web Development and the FARM Stack

Websites are built using a set of technology that is often called a stack – every component of the stack is responsible for one layer of the app. Although, in theory, you could combine any type of frontend technology with any type of background technology and, thus, end up with a custom stack, some have proven their worth in terms of agility and reduced development time, and they have strong communities and companies backing them.

In this chapter, we will provide an overview of today’s web development landscape in terms of the available technologies and demands, and we make the case for the FARM stack – a combination of FastAPI for the REST API layer, React for the frontend, and MongoDB as the database.

If you are a web developer, an analyst who must put some data online from time to time, or if you just want to broaden your developer’s horizon, this chapter should give you some perspective on this set of tools, the choices that tend to it, and how it compares to alternative technologies.

I will try to give a broad overview of the high-level concepts of the technologies that constitute the FARM stack, and I will discuss the ways that your next web development project might benefit from using this set of tools. For now, we will not go into details or concrete examples, but rather compare the selected stack components (MongoDB, FastAPI, and React) with their possible counterparts and make the case for the FARM stack.

As someone who has begun their journey through web development in what is considered the early days of yore, I remember Microsoft Frontpage and the possibility of turning Word documents into web pages. I remember using tables for layouts, and I remember animated GIF banners popping up everywhere. I also remember the excitement of putting a page online for the world to see.

Today, we have so many options for building websites and apps that it can become overwhelming to navigate and try to figure out the tools that satisfy often contradictory criteria. Websites aren’t just websites anymore – they are living creatures of the web that might evolve into, say, a mobile app or a lightweight CRM solution. Rapid tools such as React Native enable us to reuse the same (backend) code base and deliver a pretty good mobile app with almost all the native app features. Maybe the web app will need to provide some type of analytics that involves some heavy math – statistical analysis (a Spanish political party made great use of a simple statistical mobile app a couple of years ago and made a real impact by enabling its members to participate more directly in the decision-making process at all levels) or a simple recommendation algorithm. Maybe we want to add some fancy interactive charts and graphs displaying the many advanced metrics of our favorite NBA player’s statistics?

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• What is the FARM stack and how does it fit together?
• Why use MongoDB for data storage?
• What is FastAPI?
• The frontend with React

By the end of this chapter, you will have a good understanding of the benefits that individual FARM stack components bring to a development project, how they relate to each other, and why this particular set of technologies might be a great fit for web apps that have fluid specifications – both in terms of the data handled and desired functionalities.