Interesting that Graphql makes the list - any frontend devs without considerable backend experience out there that have adopted it? Would be interested in your perspective on it vs rest or rpc.
Front End Development Topics to Learn in 2019
91–100 of 143 posts
Re: Front End Development Topics to Learn in 2019
#922019 may or may not be the year, but I'm sure it's coming - this inexplicably expansive land grab of web application functionality by client-side technologies is going to peak, and things will start to swing back towards the server side.
Very unlikely. You'll see more of a merger where client-side solutions are leveraged in very specific ways to address web requirements -- similar to next.js and gatsby.js.
This seems plausible. There's usually a proliferation then a consolidation phase with any period of innovation, where people invent all sorts of ways of doing things and then gradually figure out what works best together.
Why the client-side has seen such an era of fecundity in recent years is beyond me. Perhaps because there was a real problem with leaving the job to jquery. Regardless, eventually there's just going to be too many available solutions but not enough solidified and proven methods where everything you need has been packaged together neatly because trial and error and years of iteration have pulled the optimal toolchains together and left the others by the wayside.
The way everything client oriented is just sort of floating around with no real scheme to it creates a lot of possibilities but at the same time much confusion and exhaustion. Eventually, (hopefully) there will come the standards.
Re: Front End Development Topics to Learn in 2019
#93Related to this topic: What are the minimum technologies needed to get a solid front-end stack, with a nice balance between modern features without framework/library/build tool/transpiling hell? For example, I don’t want to learn TypeScript when vanilla JavaScript will suffice. I’m wary of picking up the “hot” new frameworks because they haven’t stood the test of time and may get deprecated/irrelevant. Basically, I w…
The answer can be a bit different depending on what you already know, but here is a list of a few things things I work with:
- Rails or Express for the backend (depending on needs, I'll usually chose Rails over Express 90% of the time).
- Vanilla JS if you only need a few simple things
- Vuejs if you need a bit more complex client-side logic, but still easy setup (Vue can be installed from a tag)
- React if you need more complex UI, but it will make your client bundles more complex (while importing Vue as a script tag is ok in prod per their doc, React's docs recommend against that).
Another thing, if you already know React and you want something quick if Next.js. It's still a full React framework, so it comes with a pretty "complete" bundle that you might want to avoid, but is really plug and play and requires 0 config. You'll be able to very (very, very) quickly start building pages, etc. with server-side rendering and it works very well (I'm using it on a fairly sizeable project for a client and I'm happy with it so far). And in the case where you want to end up with just a static package that you can host on a CDN, there is an option for that. You loose server-side rendering, but that allows you to serve you website as a static website.
Re: Front End Development Topics to Learn in 2019
#94Related to this topic: What are the minimum technologies needed to get a solid front-end stack, with a nice balance between modern features without framework/library/build tool/transpiling hell? For example, I don’t want to learn TypeScript when vanilla JavaScript will suffice. I’m wary of picking up the “hot” new frameworks because they haven’t stood the test of time and may get deprecated/irrelevant. Basically, I w…
I'd strongly urge you to reconsider using TypeScript. At this point there isn't much difference between TypeScript and ES6 (besides the types) and types are a gigantic maintainability booster and significantly reduces bugs. The TypeScript language server also provides high quality autocomplete and jump-to-definition functionality in your editor of choice. It's very helpful to be able to enumerate through object methods and properties for 3rd party libraries as well as your own application code.
Re: Front End Development Topics to Learn in 2019
#95This is a solid list, but front end dev has gotten a bit absurd. I feel like I need to install 86,000 dependencies via NPM to do something that server-side frameworks already figured out. I was following a simple Vue/Vuex tutorial the other day and my node_modules directory was 200MB+. Use yarn or npm to install XYZ.... What's the difference? Why do I have to google this as step 0? Why do you assume I know the intric…
What's a language/domain/framework that's _not_ like this? After spending a few weeks struggling with Bazel and Spring you'll not convince me Java is any better.
.NET has some warts but it's pretty plug and play. Exception are xamarin, which I give them a pass for because most cross platform technologies are a little rough getting started, and office 365 add-ons.
I don't have any direct experience but I also assuming sharepoint is awful.
Re: Front End Development Topics to Learn in 2019
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's the point exactly, when you're building a public facing website, depending on your client audience it's very likely that you're not building only for modern browsers. Heck, the same holds for a large part of non-public projects as well.
Progressive Enhancement takes care of an acceptable fallback for browsers that don't support the standard.
In that case, that’s what is called “graceful degradation”, progressive enhancement goes the other way around (code for older browsers, then provide cool features for newer browsers). Like desktop first vs mobile first.
Re: Front End Development Topics to Learn in 2019
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
This (or something like it) is always the top thread. I wish this was something the frontend community cheered about, not lamented. Those 200MB of node modules are developers ad-hoc cobbling together an alternative to xcode and android studio, except entirely modular and where we have complete control. Serious application development for the open web is hamstrung by limitations and definitely in an awkward growth pha…
Yep. To repeat Dan Abramov's standard reply: > The set of dependencies that Create-React-App uses includes: > A compiler. a bundler/linker, an optimizing minifier, a linter, a development server with live reloading, and a test runner All of those are isolated and scoped to that one project, and they are all build-time dependencies only. It's also important to understand that Javascript packages are effectively distri…
> many NPM packages do include unnecessary files in the published artifacts
This is the main reason node_modules grow so quickly. Many authors are careless on what files they include in their published packages.
The npm cli now makes the package files and size visible during publishing, but I guess we need some way to shame authors publishing big packages, maybe by including size info on the npm website and downranking them in searches.
Re: Front End Development Topics to Learn in 2019
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
This (or something like it) is always the top thread. I wish this was something the frontend community cheered about, not lamented. Those 200MB of node modules are developers ad-hoc cobbling together an alternative to xcode and android studio, except entirely modular and where we have complete control. Serious application development for the open web is hamstrung by limitations and definitely in an awkward growth pha…
Yep. To repeat Dan Abramov's standard reply: > The set of dependencies that Create-React-App uses includes: > A compiler. a bundler/linker, an optimizing minifier, a linter, a development server with live reloading, and a test runner All of those are isolated and scoped to that one project, and they are all build-time dependencies only. It's also important to understand that Javascript packages are effectively distri…
Here's an interesting observation from recent HN reactions to JS:
+ The hardcore server folks are hating JS these days, because it requires more than dropping a single script tag.
+ The full-stack people / JS beginners are hating JS with a passion, because they think it's unneeded complexity for their deadline.
+ Advanced JS veterans totally like how the JS ecosystem is rapidly maturing & solving its problems in interesting ways.
And there's people like you (the latter), constantly explaining the former groups that JS isn't so bad.
I'll see if I can write a blog (or a book if it has to be) on each part of JS ecosystem that has changed with detailed explanations on why it is better.
I already wrote a piece along those lines - https://writer.zoho.com/writer/open/0y4wx08838bdbcf954b1398c... but I guess I (or someone else) can do better.
Re: Front End Development Topics to Learn in 2019
#99Related to this topic: What are the minimum technologies needed to get a solid front-end stack, with a nice balance between modern features without framework/library/build tool/transpiling hell? For example, I don’t want to learn TypeScript when vanilla JavaScript will suffice. I’m wary of picking up the “hot” new frameworks because they haven’t stood the test of time and may get deprecated/irrelevant. Basically, I w…
I'd strongly urge you to reconsider using TypeScript. At this point there isn't much difference between TypeScript and ES6 (besides the types) and types are a gigantic maintainability booster and significantly reduces bugs. The TypeScript language server also provides high quality autocomplete and jump-to-definition functionality in your editor of choice. It's very helpful to be able to enumerate through object metho…
Thanks, I’ll look into TypeScript more.
Re: Front End Development Topics to Learn in 2019
#100Related to this topic: What are the minimum technologies needed to get a solid front-end stack, with a nice balance between modern features without framework/library/build tool/transpiling hell? For example, I don’t want to learn TypeScript when vanilla JavaScript will suffice. I’m wary of picking up the “hot” new frameworks because they haven’t stood the test of time and may get deprecated/irrelevant. Basically, I w…
The answer can be a bit different depending on what you already know, but here is a list of a few things things I work with: - Rails or Express for the backend (depending on needs, I'll usually chose Rails over Express 90% of the time). - Vanilla JS if you only need a few simple things - Vuejs if you need a bit more complex client-side logic, but still easy setup (Vue can be installed from a tag) - React if you need…
Thanks, I’m leaning towards React and Vue