Front-End Development Frameworks and Languages
Just a quick history of my front-end stack preferences.
I started (like all of us) with JavaScript and without any frameworks and then there was jQuery for ages industry standard. That’s same for any senior developer with 25 years of experience:)
When Google came out with AngularJS then that was the game-changer and all modern developers started using it.
Then Facebook came out with ReactJS and the CrewNew core team switched to it when Angular came out with yet another version. Angular had too often new versions coming out and every time it needed a lot of learning curve again and again so that was really disappointing.
When VueJS started growing rapidly we had a long discussion within our core team if we should switch to Vue or not. Lot of prediction in the tech industry needed to be done. Actually more than 70% of the times we've been right with our predictions. We believed that Vue will catch up React and possibly go ahead in terms of its usage because it is: slightly lighter, easier to learn, has great documentation, is open-source, easier to get accustomed to because it picked out the good parts of React and Angular, thus making it easier for developers from either of the two backgrounds to fit in perfectly. So we started doing more Vue.
I’m a full-stack developer but I like the back-end more. I don’t like that much CSS and if the design is complex I prefer to delegate the front-end to one of my colleagues who are better in the front-end. Until I met Elm-lang. I love it. I love to build non-breaking apps. I hate bugs. I hate when I don’t know why it shows up like this not like that. Elm-lang is taught in universities because it’s a great language (yes it’s a language, not a framework) to teach and learn. I can tell loads of great things about Elm. I love Elm. Everybody who does Elm love Elm. But it comes with its cost: it will probably never become a big thing. There will never be loads of Elm templates, ready-made scripts and developers. Its community is super strong but it’s small and it will probably stay small. I don’t sell Elm to the customers much unless it’s a bigger project to be built from scratch and it’s important that it’ll be fast, light and just work perfectly and we would not win lot of time by using some ready made React template. I have written about Elm longer here.
Since we started using Hasura (about 80% of the projects we start from scratch) we have switched back to React on many projects that benefit from React Admin (see the demo, too) as it has also Hasura implementation and we just get so much beautiful looking admin panel esign & functionality out of the box that there’s no question if to use React or some other front-end stack.
Also, we don’t believe any more that Vue is going to beat React. But we are also well aware that Vue is highly popular here in the UK and if React Admin isn’t needed then we pick at many cases still Vue. A lot of our own apps & tools at CrewNew are Vue, too. And of course, in many cases we don’t pick the stack — the customer does it. Get in touch if you need Elm-lang, ReactJS/NextJS/Redux, VueJS/NuxtJS/Vuex, AngularJS or whatever front-end or back-end developers here.
