Hi
I have received a question:
“What stack are you using?”
What are they referring to and how do I answer this?
Answer:
A stack is a group of technologies used to build a complete software solution.
As you know, there are a number of technologies and languages used to build any app. For example, you will use HTML for the structure of your pages, CSS for the style and JavaScript for the logic. But that’s all only on the front end, or the user-facing side of your app.
There is also the ‘back end’ of your app, the part that the users don’t see, but those parts do all the heavy background work like storing data, images, videos etc. This is like the bottom of the iceberg.
The back end system can be built using any one of a number of different programming languages, and each language has its own group of technologies, or stacks.
For example, you can use the LAMP stack which comprises of Linux, Apache, MySQL and the PHP language.
Or you could use the Java stack which would typically be Java, Spring, MySQL and JPA.
There is also the .Net stack which comprises of the C# language, SQL Server, and the .Net framework.
The various stacks, though different from each other, do more or less the same thing. Not only that, but most have many similar features.
Hence if you learn one stack well, it will be fairly easy to learn and switch to another stack.
Fyi, IT varsity used to focus on the LAMP stack previously, but we will be introducing the .Net stack in 2021. This is partly due to the ease of learning.