Why we chose Vue.js

I do very little web these days, mostly working on backend data processing, network I/O and distributed comms.

A bit over a year ago, I wanted a real-time web UI to visualize some of the data I had on server-side, which I was trying to do using SignalR. I went back through some of the popular frameworks, with a pretty simple mindset of "Can I read the 'getting started', and get something basic working in about 15 minutes?".

I ended up choosing Vue, mainly because it used simple objects for models and I could literally just pass stuff I got from SignalR directly into it and have it show up. Almost everything else I tried had some type of wrapper/proxy around the data, which meant you had to run through some mapping exercise to get models working. I was close to deciding on Mithril, but when I found vue it just clicked with me way more. I actually really wanted to do React, but Vue was just so much more approachable that I couldn't justify spending the extra time learning React.

The real test however came months later, when I went to modify and add more functionality to my simple debug UI. I was able to pick it up nearly instantly, and even made some fairly substantial changes.

Contrast to my experience with say, Ember. We have a big app written in Ember, and every time I try to do even what I think should be a simple change (after not touching it for months), it takes me 5 times longer than I thought, and I end up spending most of the time fighting with it before realizing I forgot one of the 5 places you have to modify to reference an additional dependency, or some other equally trivial but infuriating detail.

You can learn the basics of Vue in minutes, and be quite adept within hours of it. That's something not a lot of frameworks can claim, and it's a seriously underrated benefit.

Our company migrated to vue.js, 4 months ago. Our complex app is messy with JSX, router, and new dev can't keep up with code. Now we start every new app with Vue.js. The gap between junior dev and senior dev comes closer. They can collaborate with less bugs, less problems and less time to develop.

Couldn't you just ask for JavaScript in the job description instead of React? Because if a dev knows JS s/he will handle Vue easily. Most React devs already write something else: JSX. Of course you can skip using that but won't it be like coding with your hands tied?

If you pair React with something sane like MobX, the React API surface that devs will need to use will be tiny.

I think it depends on how broadly the template is defined. If you can reasonably limit it to the portion of the UI that is impacted by the data then it isn't so bad to have logic in the template. If the model is built on the server-side, this approach ensures you don't have markup polluting your server-side code and making it less manageable in the long term.