So I started a new class for web development at my university and we are going to learn to build web apps with Spring framework and Angular 4. What do you guys think is this a good combo for web apps or are there better combos ?

Depends on, who is this course for? If it's for beginners, better not use a framework at all. When it comes to Spring and Angular, I have no experience of either, so this might be a stupid question, but isn't Spring for Java and Angular for Node.js?

@TerriToniAX It is more of an intermediate​ course, and Spring is the back end and Angular is front end.

its a good stack if you enjoy spending unneccessarily long time building webapps

@PlayerOne OK, I've somehow got the impression that Angular is both for client and server, like Vue.js - although you can use it on client-side only too.

@PlayerOne On server-side I've done PHP, ASP and .NET, but if I'd choose a new platform today, it would probably be node.js. My next framework might be vue.js, just learning it atm, but it looks promising.

@TerriToniAX As I understood from the first lesson we are going to make a server-side app with spring which will give json responses and an angular app on the client-side to read the info from the json

@PlayerOne Again, my apologies for my very limited knowledge in Angular, but I guess that Angular would make best sense if going all-in, using it both on the client and server side. If only using it as client, my guess is you might just as well use jQuery or Vue.js.

@TerriToniAX yeah, I am planing to start with vue.js in the next few weeks and don't worry I'm also new to angular. I never started to learn Angular 1 (or AngularJS) because I heard it was quite a mess but there are many improvements in 4. Anyways thanks 😁

@TerriToniAX why would you pick node.js over something more established, like PHP? I'm curious.

@wiredgecko Valid question! :) Having developed for PHP in years, I've been in doubt too about this buzz about node.js. I'm still not convinced that PHP is all that bad and that node.js is all that good, as the debate about these two has it. But, there are two points that for me personally make it worth to at least consider a transition,
1) Trending technology. OK, so node.js might or might not be a buzz word, but it's rapidly become very popular among devs, and I don't think it's a temporary trend.
2) One language. Being apple to code the full stack in javascript simply seems like a winner idea! Functionality can easily be moved/copied from server-side to the client and vice versa :)