Business Matching is Kemenperin’s (Ministry of Industry, Republic of Indonesia) program for connecting Indonesian manufacturers and IKM actors with buyers, distributors, and export channels. The digital platform behind it has been rebuilt across four stack eras since 2024 — each era matching the technology of its moment while preserving the program’s core mission. This case study documents the full arc: from a PHP 5 monolith through PHP 8 modernization, a decoupled React + Hono architecture, and the current Svelte + Go + Python system running at bm-online.id.

The first incarnation of Business Matching for Kemenperin ran on PHP 5 — a classic server-rendered monolith where every page was generated on request. IKM (small & medium industry) actors could register a company, list products in a catalog, and submit matching requests ahead of ministry-run business matching events. It did the job. Manufacturers adopted a digital matching channel for the first time, and ministry staff gained an admin view over participants. But the stack was aging fast: no dependency isolation, legacy mysql_* patterns in places, and an increasingly brittle deployment on shared hosting. Recap — Proved the model — industry would match online — but the runtime had no headroom left.

The second era rebuilt the platform on PHP 8 — same monolith shape, professional internals, developed through 2024 and running into early 2025. Typed function signatures, Composer-managed dependencies, and PDO prepared statements replaced the legacy patterns. The registration and matching flows gained server-side validation that actually held up under real ministry events. For the first time the codebase had tests covering the critical paths, and ministry staff got a dedicated admin panel to curate participants, approve companies, and schedule one-on-one matching sessions between buyers and producers. Recap — Same shape, professional internals — the modernization that bought the platform time.

Era three, landing at the end of 2025, split Business Matching in two: a React SPA for participants and a Hono-powered TypeScript API serving the data. Decoupling unlocked a genuinely mobile-friendly experience for factory-floor users and let the API serve more than one consumer. JWT-based auth replaced server sessions, PostgreSQL replaced MySQL, and the matching workflow became an explicit API contract instead of implicit page logic. The trade-off was real though — two codebases, two deploy pipelines, and validation rules duplicated on both sides. Recap — A real API and a real SPA — but double the maintenance for a small team.

Era four is the current production system at bm-online.id — a service constellation, not another monolith. SvelteKit is the primary application server: it owns Better Auth sessions, SSR, the public REST API, and every write to Neon Postgres via Drizzle. The Go backend mirrors the hot read paths at higher throughput and runs the realtime aggregation layer — a 3-second watermark poller feeding Phoenix Channels and SSE. Python owns the compute-heavy ML work through two dedicated services: ONNX embeddings behind a Rust LRU/TTL cache for codification similarity, and a Prophet forecast service with Indonesian holiday regressors. Go calls them over typed internal APIs and stays the single public gateway — one binary in front, purpose-built services behind. Recap — Not a rewrite — a constellation. SvelteKit serves, Go mirrors, Python thinks.

The 2026 platform is a service constellation, not a monolith. SvelteKit is the primary application server — it owns auth, SSR, the public REST API, and every write to the database. The Go backend mirrors the hot read paths at higher throughput and runs the realtime aggregation layer. Python owns the compute-heavy ML work through two dedicated services. Everything sits behind Cloudflare (WAF, rate limits, R2 CDN). Neon Postgres is the single source of truth — pgvector for embedding similarity, pg_trgm for code search. The full engineering document lives in the repository at src/lib/contents/kemenperin/business-matching/ARCHITECTURE.md.

bm-online.id is the living result of all four eras — the same Business Matching program Kemenperin started on PHP 5 in 2024, now running on a Svelte + Go + Python stack that actively improves matches. The history above documents what changed, why it changed, and what each version looked like in production.