Our technology

New applications

New National Archive applications SHOULD be deployed to the Public Cloud and use the following approved languages and tools:

• HTML
• JavaScript - for either progressive enhancement or for compiling web assets using tools like Webpack through NodeJS
• CSS
• Python
• Postgres
• Docker - to create deployable containers
• Terraform - to provision and manage infrastructure in the cloud
• Nginx - to provide a reverse proxy in front of Docker containers

In addition to this, engineers COULD also use:

• TypeScript - which must be compiled down to JavaScript
• SCSS - allows us to more easily write CSS

Any other technologies MUST be proposed to and agreed by the Technical Architects Group through the process of requesting changes.

These decisions have been guided by The GDS Way - Programming languages.

There will be sensible reasons to not follow the above guidance on languages. For example when you're:

• extending an existing codebase or ecosystem
• scripting in a particular environment
• experimenting during an alpha (with an expectation that it's replaced by something we have more confidence in for beta)
• working in a very specific or unusual problem domain, like heavy use of WebSockets

The set of languages we're comfortable supporting will change over time.

Other technologies

There are a number of existing applications which rely on technologies such as:

• .NET/ASP/C#
• Java
• PHP (used by a number of WordPress sites)
• Scala
• MongoDB
• Triplestore
• Perl
• Vue

If you want to use one of these languages for a new project it first MUST be discussed with a member of the Technical Architects Group and/or the Technical Governance Board.