What was my boss talking about when he said stack?

Question

So my company works in ColdFusion, and it can be really frustrating to not have support on newer items unlike what you would get by using .NET or Java. I will be remaking a website for the company, from scratch.

I went up to my boss yesterday, and asked him if we could possibly change the language that we worked on, and I told him I'm most comfortable in C#.NET and could do it in MVC. What he said is that he'd be okay with me doing it in whatever language I wanted to, as long as there would be no problems with our "Stack". I asked him what he meant, and he said, the last he heard, our stack could use: Python, Java, Ruby, and a couple others, but that if it had changed, and could do .NET, then I could write the code in that.

So what does he mean by stack?

Answer 1

He means the hardware and software (in terms of operating system, database and web server) your company is running to power the website.

From the list he's given it's very unlikely you'll be able to use .NET - that requires a Microsoft based stack consisting of Windows Server, SQL Server and IIS. The technologies he lists are mainly open source, and while they will work on a Microsoft setup, they're far more commonly used on Linux-based systems.