Our Tech Stack

Under the Hood: The Tech Stack Powering Irish Tax Hub

Ever wondered what goes into building a modern website like Irish Tax Hub? We aim to provide a smooth, fast, and reliable experience for users navigating the complexities of Irish tax. Achieving this requires a carefully selected set of technologies working together seamlessly. In this post, we'll give you a high-level peek behind the curtain at the core technologies that power both the user-facing website and the calculation engine behind our tools.

The Frontend Foundation: Next.js and React

At the heart of the Irish Tax Hub website lies Next.js, a powerful and popular React framework. Why Next.js? It offers a fantastic blend of features ideal for building high-performance web applications.

• Performance: Next.js enables techniques like Server-Side Rendering (SSR) and Static Site Generation (SSG), which mean pages load faster for you, the user, and help with things like Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
• Developer Experience: It provides a streamlined development workflow, allowing our team to build and iterate on features efficiently.
• React Ecosystem: Built on top of React, the leading UI library, we leverage its component-based architecture to create reusable and maintainable user interface elements.

The Backend Engine: Python, Flask, and the Irish Tax Hub API

While the Next.js application handles what you see and interact with directly, the complex calculations and logic powering our various tax tools reside in a separate, dedicated backend API (internally known as irishtaxhubapi). This API is built using Python and the lightweight Flask web framework.

• Why Python & Flask? Python's readability and extensive libraries make it well-suited for complex calculations and data manipulation involved in tax logic. Flask provides a minimal yet powerful foundation for building the API, allowing us to create specific endpoints for each calculation needed by the frontend.
• Separation of Concerns: Building the API separately allows us to decouple the user interface from the core calculation logic. This makes the system more robust, scalable, and easier to maintain. When tax rules change, we can update the Python/Flask API independently without necessarily needing large changes to the Next.js website frontend.
• Focused Functionality: This dedicated service focuses solely on processing tax-related data and returning results to the frontend application, ensuring our tools are accurate and efficient.

Managing Content with Ease: Prismic CMS

A lot of the information and guidance on Irish Tax Hub needs to be updated regularly. To manage this efficiently without requiring code changes for every text update, we use Prismic.

• Headless CMS: Prismic is a Headless Content Management System (CMS). This means it provides a user-friendly interface for us to manage website text, images, and other content, while giving our developers the flexibility to display that content however they need within the application.
• Slice Machine: We use Prismic's Slice Machine, which integrates tightly with Next.js, allowing us to build reusable content components (Slices) that content editors can mix and match to create pages.

Styling It Out: Tailwind CSS & DaisyUI

To create a consistent and visually appealing user interface rapidly, we utilize Tailwind CSS.

• Utility-First: Tailwind is a utility-first CSS framework. Instead of writing custom CSS rules for everything, we apply pre-defined utility classes directly in our components. This speeds up development and ensures visual consistency across the site.
• Component Library: We also leverage DaisyUI, a plugin for Tailwind, to provide pre-built components like buttons, forms, and modals, further accelerating UI development while maintaining consistency with Tailwind's approach.

Ensuring Code Quality: TypeScript

While users don't see it directly, TypeScript plays a crucial role behind the scenes in our Next.js frontend.

• Static Typing: TypeScript adds static types to JavaScript. This helps catch potential errors during development, long before they reach the user, leading to more robust and reliable code.

Key Integrations & Hosting

Beyond the core frameworks and CMS, several other services are vital:

• Stripe: Securely handles any payment processing required on the platform.
• Resend: Manages the sending of transactional emails (like confirmation messages).
• React Google ReCAPTCHA: Helps protect against spam and abuse on forms.
• Vercel: We host the Irish Tax Hub Next.js frontend on Vercel, a platform optimized for modern web applications, providing excellent performance, scalability, and features like Analytics and Speed Insights to monitor the user experience.

Conclusion

Building Irish Tax Hub involves bringing together a suite of modern technologies. By leveraging Next.js for a high-performance frontend, a dedicated Python/Flask backend API for complex calculations, Prismic for flexible content management, Tailwind CSS for rapid UI development, and TypeScript for code reliability – alongside essential integrations hosted on platforms like Vercel – we can focus on what matters most: providing a clear, fast, accurate, and helpful resource for understanding Irish taxes. This separation of concerns and use of specialized tools allows us to build efficiently, maintain high quality, and continuously improve the platform for our users.

Want to Learn More?

Interested in the technologies we use? Check out their official documentation:

• Next.js
• React
• Python
• Flask
• Prismic
• Tailwind CSS
• DaisyUI
• TypeScript
• Stripe
• Resend
• React Google ReCAPTCHA
• Vercel