Alan Kay was right, programming is pop culture.
It's increasingly harder to find non-legacy single page apps that aren't using React or Angular (Vue and Ember are distantly trailing behind). Corollary: it's increasingly harder to find jobs for anything other than React or Angular.
After technology du jour becomes popular, people will use it not because it's good or even necessary, but because it will ensure their employment. And then the rationalizations sink in afterwards.
This seems like a great writeup with some good information in it.
But to be picky, the title needs work. It isn't as describe. In fact it contradicts itself.
The title is:
> Front-end Walkthrough: Building a Single Page Application from Scratch
Half way down the article:
> When it comes to building a SPA, you can either do things from scratch or use a library to help you out. Building from scratch is a lot of work and adds a lot of new decisions to be made, so we decided to go with a framework.
I would be very interested to see an article in 2017 that is actually from scratch. Bonus points for not using a ES6 transpiler. Like "Linux from Scratch" (the book)... useless from a practical standpoint but awesome from a learning standpoint.
Edit: as a side note, when I started making web apps, jQuery was still in beta so I didn't even use it. A lot has changed, obviously, for one SPA didn't really exist then.
I want to point out that it works perfectly fine making a JavaScript web app in just vanilla JavaScript using NodeJS as server and the browser as client. You do not need any frameworks!! Vanilla JavaScript works for both small projects and big projects. And it performs well! (at least compared to the popular frameworks) and it's very nice to debug! There is no complication step! And your code will be supported for ever unlike the framework's that will make your code obsolete within a year or so.
yet another web framework medium article with a misleading angular vs react comparison.
it isn't angular 2 anymore. it's just angular. it's been out for over a year and if people were having problems running it in production, we would hear about it. there are many sites running angular 2-4 in production, google it and see for yourself. just because google didn't rewrite gmail in angular doesn't mean you shouldn't use it.
I wonder if there is some highly ranked google search result that spreads this misinformation, months after some of these points were valid.
Recommendation for poki, make it easier to reach your website from your blog.
When I go to blog.poki.com, if I like what I read I typically delete "blog." to checkout what "poki.com" is about -- which should be the purpose of blogging. In this case it doesn't work, and I had to manually type "www.".
Most of the issues cited with Angular and React aren't really issues in EmberJS right now. I always find it interesting that so many people jump right into frameworks that have design philosophies against maintainability.
I am doing SPA with vuejs and django backend, its a huge step in the right direction as far as (my) web development goes. Initially I was sceptical of webpack, now I see what an asset it is in compiling static content and many other handy features. I prefer vuejs to react or angular but I haven't really given them much time, maybe one day
"We knew we wanted to build a single page application (SPA) in order to have more control over the user experience of our website, making it as smooth as possible. On top of this, it also helps speed our website up since there’s no longer a need for full page reloads. We only need to load the data that we don’t have yet, and then re-render the page."
I'm bothered by this perception that SPAs inherently provide a better user experience. They certainly can provide a different user experience, but "better" is entirely up to the developers. I'd argue its actually quite hard to create a better UX in an SPA than the simple page based UX metaphor everyone is used to that the browser provides. Netflix is an example of a great UX from an SPA, nba leaguepass is an example of a disaster SPA.
Also there is no inherent speed boost from an SPA. Anything that is slow on the server will still be slow, and its up to the developer to create a good UX for latency. In page driven applications, the browser provides a fairly standard UX for page loading that most people are used to. In SPA apps, the developer needs to roll this themselves. Widgets popping in all over the place at different times, moving things all over the page, is a common UX I see in SPAs that is not good.