Framework soup

I’ve read a few interesting articles on the subject, various authors’s perspectives; some swear by frameworks and other seem to need inoculation.

Why stay away from jumping into frameworks promptly, although they all seem so attractive at first sight? For moi, it’s simplicity.

Let’s take JavaScript for instance, like many others, never liked it. Until ES5, I changed my mind, or perhaps was forced to face the rehashed reality of client side programming. JS has been growing at an astonishing rate, and with reason. It’s a language that caters to how the Internet is being used today, leveraging the common denominator between devices; the web browser. And, it’s fairly easy to use.

As of 2019, starting a project with JavaScript requires research to determine the tools you claim are needed. Vue.js, React or Angular 1, or Angular 2, Bootstrap, or Materialize, or Korbin and so on, what to pick is entertainment on it’s own.

The ingredients to make your soup of code, end up leaving an after taste.

You start cooking some real JavaScript, later, when you’ve settled into rearranging your workflows into following the protocols set by the frameworks. You past the learning curve and you finally get to be productive.

All this does is burn the soup and time, leads to errors, makes code complicated where in most cases, well planned vanilla JS could succeed equally, if not better (simpler code, less bloat).

Furthermore, reviewing code written by someone else or another team, in a framework you don’t fully understand, looks just like a foreign language.

In 99% of projects, a framework is overkill. Don’t just learn a framework and a framework’s abstraction; learn the fundamentals of programming.

But, who wants to reinvent the wheel?

You could say I’m a hypocrite. I’m currently using AdminLTE, with all it’s libraries along with Google’s Firebase and other kits to produced a few PWAs (Progressive Web App).

I chose AdminLTE as a template, avoiding the need to design anything and using the out of fashion JQuery lib to manipulate the interface. Laziness being a driving factor, along with time constraint , only made Firebase a more attractive back-end solution, and it’s free (like in beer).

It’s new promising web like never before!

In the past, major caveats of the web allowed frameworks to shine. Today , we have new ways to manage routing, state and views, templates and components and so on.

It’s time to K.I.S.S. and enjoy the soup.