Web Development for Beginners – A Curriculum

- statelessness of the server (REST)

- the lifecycle of a single request

- the lifecycle of a single (server-)app (microframweworks)

OOP devs unfamiliar with server development tend to pollute the app lifecycle with hidden state in some singletons that are swirling around globally. The requirement that servers should be able to parallelize request-processing is mostly an afterthought and hidden app state makes it impossible to parallelize anything.

A sequence diagram of a single request would help there a lot IMHO and a short explanation of how to keep the response times short, by doing long-running tasks in the background with message queues.

[1]: https://blog.isquaredsoftware.com/2020/11/how-web-apps-work-...

Alternatively: it's just teaching whatever is popular in the industry, for better or worse (similarly to how DevOps people would be taught Kubernetes, even if it can be horrible in certain cases and for smaller projects).

Many sites out there don't need JS. Server side rendering would suffice. And many other sites out there would be well served with minimal JS for enriching a few forms.

Yet, that's not the reality that we live in. The reality is that the majority of the developers out there will simply have to deal with lots of JavaScript, TypeScript and frameworks like Vue, React, Angular (i'm using the term "framework" here because they change the entire direction of the development of your front end, not that it matters at all).

So, that's what curriculums will focus on, since clearly people want to have good employment prospects. It doesn't seem like the linked one gets too caught up with the frameworks, though.

I struggle too. I'll tried a lot of different things (ex : puppeteer vs cypress, react vs angular2), and I end up having my own preference.

I'll try to answer some of your questions :

- Should I use SPA ? Slower initial page loading time, but faster to load more pages. Good if typical user stay long on website and navigate multiple pages.

- Es6 import ? Use them when you can, better IDE support than require.

- Build tool ? Start with webpack, oldest tool, with more chance to find answer to your questions on stackoverflow. Although I have little experience on the others (Rollup, etc), so maybe there is one that is simpler to start with.

- React or Vue ? Idk, haven't used view, both are popular and similar, take one you prefer the syntax ?

- Something simpler ? Well, there is too much choice... Vanilla js, another cool library, low code or no code like wordpress...

- SSR ? Less API to build. Faster initial page loading. Roughly. There is quite a lot of library out there with SSR, and it is elvolving quite fast. The future is probably a mix of server and client side rendering.

- npm vs yarn ? I recently played with npm workspaces, and yarn had a feature I needed, otherwise I think sticking to npm is fine. Historically yarn became popular because it introduced .lock file before npm. Npm has since catch up.

- Css compiler ? Minifying, or compiling sass ? You can start without it. Also starter like "create react app" already do these optimizations for you.

- Typescript ? Use it ! Only exception would be your code is too simple to take advantage of typing.