What are the current recommendations for rapidly building a web application? Back in the day it used to be Rails. It seems like Phoenix is picking up steam.
Are there any other full-stack frameworks that take you from nothing to something fairly robust in a few hours?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15685905
For full stack opinionated frameworks, there are a few like Laravel (PHP), Django (Python), Rails (Ruby), Phoenix (Elixir). They all come with batteries included for the most part. Then there is node/expressjs ecosystem if you are into that.
Then you have micro backend frameworks like lumen (PHP), Flask (Python), Sinatra (Ruby) which can be used to build APIs etc.
For front end javascript, you have react, vuejs and angular as the top 3. You also have elm (compiles to js) and then some other players like mithril etc. Good old jquery is still out there.
For more realtime stuff, you can use websockets (socket.io library etc), google firebase, pusher etc